“The courtship and remarriage of an old widower is always made more difficult when middle-aged children are involved –especially when there are unmarried daughters. This seemed particularly true in the landlocked, backwater city of Memphis some forty-odd years ago” (opening line).
Winner of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Peter Taylor’s A Summons to Memphis is a reflective, engrossing novel about a Manhattanite who is abruptly summoned back to his family home in Tennessee to help his sisters address his widower father’s plans to remarry a “youngish woman.” Many years ago, our narrator Phillip Carver fled from his family home in Memphis to live a more independent life in New York City, where he has convinced himself he is now happy working as an antique book dealer and publisher. He lives in supposed “serenity” with his long-term girlfriend Holly Kaplan (a Jewish woman from Cleveland who is fifteen years his junior) in a tenth-floor apartment on 82nd Street. Phillip and Holly are unmarried and have no children.
One day, while going through a brief separation from Holly following a quarrel, Phillip is suddenly beckoned back to Tennessee by his two older sisters: blond, vivacious Betsy and dark-haired, blue-eyed, introspective Josephine (or simply “Jo”) when they express concerns about their octogenarian father’s abrupt plans to remarry a younger woman named Clara Stockwell. Both of them are also unmarried and without children. Previously, they had been sending their brother lurid letters about all the silly escapades their aging father pursued as he entertained ladies dancing out at bars. But now things have gotten more serious.
As Phillip makes plans to fly home, he reflects on his family history. In particular, one moment has tormented the Carver family for decades. It all occurred back in 1931 during the Great Depression when his lawyer father (Mr. George Carver) was deceived and financially ruined by a close friend and business partner, Lewis Shackleford (whose full name is actually Merriweather Lewis Shackleford). Times were tight and Shackleford’s company attempted an expansion of its insurance business into Missouri where it was discovered that certain large landholdings had been heavily mortgaged and that money had been transferred without Mr. Carver’s knowledge. This led to the Carver family suddenly uprooting their lives in Nashville in order to start anew in Memphis –thus relocating from the Upper South to the Deep South, which meant “moving from a handsome estate on the Franklin Pike south of Nashville to a rather plain city house in midtown Memphis” (10).
Phillip spends a great deal of time here contrasting the two cities –Nashville and Memphis—from their differing styles of architecture to the fashion choices of businessmen in each city, and in doing so, Phillip also offers commentary and the “old” versus the “new” South, especially the traditions that are still held, such as the Nashville obsession with well-born gentility and gentlemanliness (even though Phillip, himself, proudly declares that he has escaped this world for the freedom of New York City). Whereas Nashville represents the outgrowth of the old rural southern aristocracy, Memphis stands for a more degraded banal southern urban life, and this cultural decay is expressed in the people who live there. One of the main distinctions between the old and new South is the background portraiture of African Americans –whereas they were once enslaved on vast plantations, now many families (Phillip’s included) employ Black servants who cook food and chauffeur people around. Their labor is the ever-silent backbone of Southern commerce. For Phillip and the Carver family, the hasty move from Nashville to Memphis was incredibly disruptive. Phillip’s mother spent the rest of her life trying to put on a happy face for the family despite being tremendously disappointed she was no longer ensconced in her family’s old high society Presbyterian culture in Nashville (Phillip notes that she died two years ago from the time he is writing in the 1970s of “real or imagined invalidism” as she eventually became bedridden). She was known to sometimes refer to the Memphis move as their family’s Cherokee “Trail of Tears.” The move also effectively ruined Phillip’s sisters’ who were in the midst of their respective debutante seasons (it didn’t help that Phillip’s father also apparently sabotaged their individual marriage prospects). And Phillip’s older brother Georgie apparently decided he could no longer take the family and enlisted in the Air Corps during World War II (despite always falsely claiming he was drafted) only to be killed on D-Day. As for Phillip, his own budding romance with his first love, Clara Price, was also sabotaged by his father –an event he has long resented. And his decision to become a rare bookseller was at least partly inspired by a comment his father made when he was younger (expressing more concern for the physicality of his books rather than the contents contained inside).
In the ensuing years after returning home from World War II (an experience in which Phillip claims to have briefly met Gertrude Stein), Phillip suddenly managed escaped his family and flee like “Peter Pan” off to Manhattan where he now lives, while his sisters have remained behind in Memphis all these years and started a successful real estate and insurance business (unlike the one that ruined their father). At the same time, both sisters remain obsessed with their father, seemingly and quietly intent upon exacting revenge on him. Are the children really this concerned about inheritance? Wrapped in layers of irony and digression, Phillip’s commentary on the situation would seem to suggest otherwise. Another minor character who pops up from time to time in the novel is Alex Mercer, a friend of Phillip who works as a professor of English at Memphis State University and has apparently earned the favor of Phillip’s father. In many respects, Alex serves as a mirror of Phillip had he chosen to remain in Memphis. Phillip recounts several stories of Memphis children suing their fathers over “non compos mentis” or even locking them away, but it seems as if Phillip, Jo, and Betsy simply want to make their father feel punished, or at least remind him of what he did to rob them of their futures after moving the family to Memphis.
During one of several trips back to Tennessee, Phillip and his sisters take their father up to Owl Mountain, a wooden getaway in the Cumberland Mountains, where they happen upon Phillip’s former love interest, Clara Price and her family (though Phillip decides against saying hello) and then none other than Lewis Shackleford shows up, the man who once ruined the Carver family. But when he strolls over to their table, now an elderly man with a cane, Phillip’s father rises to greet him and they strike up a friendship again, much to the concern of Phillip’s sisters.
Later, after Phillip has returned to New York and reunited with his girlfriend Holly, his father has declared his intention to travel and visit Mr. Shackleford, despite showing signs of ill health. Thus, once again, Phillip flies back to Tennessee and helps his sisters to keep their father from undertaking such a reckless journey. At the last moment, Phillip makes the split-second decision to box his father’s car in the driveway, preventing him from leaving for long enough while they exchange pleasantries, just long enough for a phone call to come in: Lewis Shackleford has died of a heart attack.
From here, Phillip and his father strike up a newfound bond, speaking on the telephone every week about memories and people from their past, during which Phillip reflects on his father’s status as a former football star and Vanderbilt scholar before becoming a state legislator and son of three generations of surveyors and old-fashioned land lawyers (much like Peter Taylor’s own father), but in the end George Carver tragically dies and Phillip debates whether or not he made the right choice to either remember, forget, or forgive the pain his father had caused him during his life.
A Summons to Memphis is a powerful story that leaves me wondering to what extent we can trust these family members. Are Phillip’s sisters honest? Is Phillip a reliable narrator? Is the portrait they offer of their aging father fair? Despite giving readers a plethora of personal information, Phillip is still a fairly questionable narrator who seems to have something to hide about the way he and his sisters have treated their father in his waning years. After all, why would they try to stop their father’s remarriage considering the fact that all three siblings are highly successful and seemingly without need of an inheritance? Is it all merely an act of pride? Perhaps Peter Taylor is revealing to us something troubling about the nature of familial bonds, links that run deeper than mere riches or superficiality. The siblings care more about controlling their father, requiting him, and making him feel the dejection they once felt at his hand. After all, by the end of the book, Phillip returns to his Manhattan apartment and looks around his room, expressing dissatisfaction with all the meaningless objects he owns. Additionally, he shares the story of a prized leaf pendant he was once gifted by his mother to pass along to his paramour Clara as a gift. But by the conclusion of the novel, despite carrying it with him all these years, he seemingly no longer cares for its sentimentality and simply hands it over to Holly with little care.
Peter Taylor later stated his purpose with this novel was to pose the question: “how successful are we ever in understanding what has happened to us?” Ultimately, Phillip’s unreliability as a narrator is a result of his incapacity to truly grasp what has happened to him. Thus, he opens his notebooks and offers a wandering series of reflections on his familial life. Throughout the book, he presents scattered memories of his father, some flattering, others not so much, and still others are contradictory. Phillip’s fragmented recollections are immensely conflicting and complex as he pieces together his kaleidoscope life-story, and in doing so, he discovers a certain degree of independence and rebellion from his father, albeit different from the kind of revenge his sisters seek.
At any rate, a deeply personal autobiographical work, A Summons to Memphis shows us how children often respond in unpredictable, reactive ways to the actions of their parents, even many decades later, even as people like Phillip Carver attempt to extricate themselves from the stifling air of Tennessee only to find themselves ultimately bound up in its traditions anyway, forever waiting to be summoned back to Memphis once more.
Lastly, Marilynne Robinson (later a Pulitzer Prize-winner herself) penned a wonderfully erudite review of Peter Taylor’s A Summons to Memphis in The New York Times Book Review in 1986. It comes highly recommended from me.
Notable Quotations
“We were not after all a genuine Memphis family. We had lived in Memphis only thirty years” (5).
“Anyway, for the past several months past, Holly and I had been nagging at each other and contradicting each other rather endlessly –apparently over almost nothing. I think perhaps we were simply another case of middle-aged doldrums, which must be the same whether it involves sensible people like us, living unwed together in New York, or less fortunate people caught in a foolish marriage back in Memphis or Cleveland… When I was not going over manuscripts and proof sheets I suppose I was wondering what it was that was wrong between Holly and me. Neither of us knew why things had gone so sour, why the satisfaction had gone out of our formerly serene existence together. For weeks and months we had kept going over the particulars of our systematic, well-ordered life, expecting to find the trouble in some element of our life that was perhaps just too obvious for us to see… Within only two or three days after Holly had gone I knew there was nothing to be gained by our living apart. I thought of how it would be to spend the rest of my life alone, as I had done when I first came to New York. I saw myself traipsing down that little corridor every morning from bedroom to kitchen and back to my study and settling in to my work without a word from anybody. (I never went to my publishing office till afternoon.) it was a gloomy prospect” (8-10).
“Betsy and Josephine Carver are women of a generation for whom a long-distance telephone call, outside of business, can mean but one thing. It means, to say the least, a family crisis” (10).
“‘It’s Father, Phillip. Your father is making plans to remarry’” (11).
“After the second call was concluded I continued to sit for a long while beside the telephone in the loggia of my apartment. Total darkness had descended before on a light and went into my study. While I sat there I seemed to see my father at that very hour –it would have been an hour earlier in Memphis, of course—moving about the twilight shadows of his suburban house while simultaneously his two daughters, twenty blocks away, had been on the long-distance telephone with me, plotting the defeat of what must now be his great purpose in life. I think I felt totally indifferent. I thought only: Oh, the foolishness of Memphis ways! And I felt a surge of happiness that I had got away so long ago” (13).
“Yet there is a difference between these two provincial cities even nowadays. Each has its nucleus of high rises at the center and its spreading suburbs for miles around, but still there is a difference between them. And it’s not just its old money and country music that makes Nashville different from Memphis. Even with its present-day vulgar, ugly, plastic look and sound there is a little something else left for anyone who was once under Nashville’s spell. As one walks or rides any street in Nashville one can feel now and again that he has just glimpsed some pedestrian on the sidewalk who was not quite real somehow, who with a glance over his shoulder or with a look in his disenchanted eye has warned one not to believe too much in the plastic present and has given warning that the past is still real and present somehow and is demanding something of all men like me who happen to pass that way” (23-24).
“Memphis was today. Nashville was yesterday” (27).
“Though Memphis was a considerably larger city than Nashville, the young men seemed countrier to him –more Mississippian it was, of course. Nashville was, by the Huntingdon-Huxley road, approximately two hundred twenty miles east of Memphis, two hundred twenty miles nearer to Richmond, to Charleston, to Savannah. But when Father spoke, one felt that it was more like two hundred twenty thousand miles” (42).
“There is a certain serenity about the free and independent sort of life live here that a Memphis family man cannot fail to envy, living as I do, that is, with a woman some fifteen years younger than myself and having for my friends intellectual people who have more involvement with the dull, practical problems of domestic life than I do” (53).
“But I believe it is a sign of remarkable intelligence in a man –or in a woman—when like my father he does not make categorical distinctions in his mind between other people, with regard to age or sex or race, but instead merely senses the intelligence of every individual” (77).
“Why on earth, I might have found myself asking, should the undistinguished Mrs. Clara Stockwell become the sole heir to the tidy fortune Father had amassed in his very lucrative law practice of the past thirty years? There was no longer any land in the family of course –and no grandchildren to be thought of—but there were other personal features of the estate to be considered” (128).
“…everyone in any community prefers a born hero to a made hero. It means that he has the highest favor of the gods. He is born lucky!” (161).
“As Alex pulled his old Chevrolet under Father’s porte cochere I saw Horace slowly bringing Father’s Buick convertible up from the garage. I was not unaware –and I don’t believe Alex could have been—that only through the porte cochere could the big Buick automobile pass on into the front driveway and so out through the entrance gateway to Poplar Pike. Nevertheless, I promptly hopped out of the car and started for the side door. But suddenly I halted and looked back at Horace and the Buick again. And without thinking what I was saying almost, I called out to Alex to come with me and to bring car keys. What I said caused me to stop there for a split second longer. Because it was only when I had spoken to Alex about his keys that I became aware of my own intentions. And I was filled with doubt again about what my intentions were. I cannot remember ever being less sure of my own aims” (195-196).
“On the long-distance telephone we were able to speak of things we had never been able to talk about face to face” (207).
“And so Holly and I are still here. And my sisters are still occupying my father’s house, like two spinsters in the last century, with the family servants still there to look after them. Though they have written me several times that they think of moving back into one of their own houses at midtown and even of returning to their real estate business, I am confident that they never will. The old charade would no longer have its significance, and they seem to have nothing else to live for” (208).
“As for Holly and me, I don’t know wat the end is to be for two people like us. We have our serenity of course and we have put Memphis and Cleveland out of our lives. Those places mean nothing to us nowadays. And surely there is nothing in the world that can interfere with the peace and quiet of life in our tenth-floor apartment. I have the fantasy that when we get too old to continue in the magazine and book trade the two of us, white-haired and with trembly hands, will go on puttering amongst our papers and books until when the dusk of some winter day fades into darkness we’ll fail to put on the lights in these rooms of ours, and when the sun shines in next morning there will be simply no trace of us. We shall not be dead, I fantasize. For who can imagine he will ever die? but we won’t for a long time have been ‘alive enough to have the strength to die.’ Our serenity will merely have been translated into a serenity in another realm of being. How else, I ask myself, can one think of the end of two such serenely free spirits as Holly Kaplan and I?” (208-209, closing paragraph).
The 1987 Pulitzer Prize Decision
The 1987 Fiction jury consisted of the following three individuals:
- Chair: Peter S. Prescott (1935-2004) was an author and long-time book critic for Newsweek. In 1978, he won the George Polk Award for criticism. His father was Orville Prescott, book critic for The New York Times (1942-1966) who also served as a Pulitzer Prize fiction jury member in the past. His books included two collections of critical essays, a study of the juvenile-justice system and a memoir of his freshman year at Harvard. He also published a book on his criticism entitled Never in Doubt: Critical Essays on American Books, 1972-1985 (1986). He was an alumnus of Harvard University and studied for a spell at the Sorbonne. He died of liver complications resulting from diabetes in 2004. He was survived by his wife and two children.
- Alison Lurie (1926-2020) was a Professor of English at Cornell University who won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for her novel Foreign Affairs. Click here to read my full review of her life and Pulitzer prize-winning novel.
- Frank D. McConnell (1942-1999) was born in Louisville, Kentucky. He graduated from the University of Notre Dame summa cum laude in 1964, then went on to Yale University where he received his M.A. in 1965 and his Ph.D. in 1968 with a dissertation on Wordsworth’s The Prelude under the direction of Harold Bloom. He taught English at Cornell University (1967-1971), and Northwestern University (1971-1981). He joined the English faculty at UC Santa Barbara in 1982 where he would teach for 16 years. He published several books including The Confessional Imagination: A Reading of Wordsworth’s Prelude, The Spoken Seen: Film and the Romantic Imagination, Four Postwar American Novelists: Bellow, Mailer, Barth and Pynchon, Storytelling and Mythmaking: Images from Film and Literature, and The Science Fiction of H.G. Wells. After arriving in California, McConnell published a series of detective novels about a nun who inherits her father’s investigative agency (Murder Among Friends, Blood Lake, The Front King, and Liar’s Poker). He wrote a regular humorous column in the Catholic journal Commonweal. Upon his death in 1999, the University of California wrote an In Memoriam: “With Frank McConnell’s death on 17 January 1999, the UCSB Department of English lost its most popular undergraduate teacher. With lectures at once passionate and irreverent, often ribald, he held classes of five to seven hundred students spellbound on subjects as diverse as science fiction and Shakespeare. His colleagues knew him as prodigiously wide in his learning–as well as brilliantly witty, always ready with a comic story of sharp quip.” He was a Guggenheim fellow, a Fulbright professor in Germany, and served on several Pulitzer Prize for Fiction juries (twice as chair). He was married twice, divorced once, and was survived by two sons when he died in 1999.
The two runners up for the 1987 Pulitzer Prize were: Paradise by Donald Barthelme and Whites by Norman Rush.
Interestingly enough, the top selection for the 1987 Fiction Jury was actually Whites by Norman Rush, a short story collection based on Rush’s experience alongside his wife as co-directors of the Peace Corps in Botswana. I am not entirely sure what happened between the jury and the board, but somewhere along the way A Summons to Memphis was awarded the prize instead of Whites.
In the jury report, the trio wrote: “The Fiction Jury found this a puzzling, even exasperating year. Many of America’s best novelists weighed in with books that do not compare favorably with their best past efforts –Robert Stone, Joyce Carol Oates and John Updike among them. A likely candidate –Norman Rush’s Whites—surfaced early. We three agreed at once that this remarkable book was well worth the prize. But we were charged with finding two more to recommend –and this proved uncommonly difficult. We all found books we liked, but none that we could persuade our co-jurors was worth a Pulitzer Prize. More important: none of us was sufficiently seized by any of these likable books to put up much of an argument in its behalf… Although we were urged not to weight our recommendations, we must respectfully report that we cannot refrain from so doing. It is our unanimous recommendation that Norman Rush’s collection of remarkable stories, Whites, is alone worthy of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Our other recommendations –Donald Barthelme’s Paradise and Peter Taylor’s A Summons to Memphis—are listed alphabetically and are offered with the understanding that all three of us found these novels something less than their author’s best work, particularly their work in the short story form.”
Of A Summons to Memphis, the jury wrote: “Beneath this novel’s assured, casually elegant prose –just as beneath the mannered traditional world of the urban southern aristocracy in which it is set –is a darker universe of passion, greed, loyalty and revenge. The people who inhabit this world are as beautiful and cool as icebergs, and nine-tenths of their energy lies below the surface. As subtly as henry James, and as relentlessly, Peter Taylor makes them visible. Yet the writer he seems closes to is Ford Madox Ford, whose The Good Solider is also about the damage that brilliant, well-bred people can do to each other, and the attempt of a survivor to understand what has happened. Peter Taylor is already recognized as one of the finest short story writers in America. A Summons to Memphis proves that he is also a wonderfully gifted novelist.”
In 1987, the Pulitzer Prize issued a special award to Joseph Pulitzer Jr. (1913-1993), grandson of the famous prize’s founder. He chaired the Pulitzer Board at Columbia for 31 years and was the last member of the Pulitzer family to directly participate in the Prize process (to date). Along with Columbia University president William J. McGill and Pulitzer Prize administrator John Hohenberg, he oversaw the prize’s transition from an advisory group under the aegis of the Columbia trustees to the principal award-granting body in 1975. The award was granted: “For his extraordinary services to American journalism and letters during his 31 years as chairman of the Pulitzer Prize Board and for his accomplishments as an editor and publisher.”
Who is Peter Taylor?
Peter Taylor (1917-1994) was born in Trenton, Tennessee to a notable political family with a unique history. His grandfather (that is, his mother’s father) Robert L. Taylor had been both a U.S. Senator (serving one term) and the Governor of Tennessee (serving three terms). His father’s father had fought for the Confederate Army as a private under Nathan Bedford Forrest and led quite a stories life thereafter. During World War II, Peter Taylor served in the U.S. Army in England. But afterward, unwilling to become a lawyer like his father, Peter Taylor decided to study literature and creative writing at Vanderbilt University, where he came under the tutelage of poet John Crowe Ransom. At first, he wrote poetry before turning to short story writing (many of his stories were later published in The New Yorker and in its obituary The New York Times dubbed him a “Short-Story Master”). Peter Taylor also studied at Kenyon College and Louisiana State University where he met and befriended poet Robert Lowell. He later also befriended numerous literary luminaries in the Southern tradition like Robert Penn Warren, Katherine Anne Porter, and Jean Stafford –all three of whom also won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He went on to teach at Harvard University, the University of North Carolina, and Kenyon College (from which he graduated in 1940).
For many years he headed the creative-writing program at the University of Virginia. In 1984, he was one of four writers to receive a senior fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (then valued at $25,000). He was also a Guggenheim, Fulbright, and Ford Foundation fellowship recipient, and he won an O. Henry Award for his short story “Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time” published in The Kenyon Review. Throughout his career, he was the author of seven books of stories (his collection “The Old Forest and Other Stories” won the PEN/Faulkner Award), eight compilations of stories, and three novels. In addition to winning the Pulitzer Prize for A Summons to Memphis, he also won the Ritz Paris Hemingway Award for the same novel (the Ritz Paris Hemingway Award is a now defunct award that was issued during the 1980s for the best novel of the year to honor Hemingway’s long-lasting personal affiliation with the Hotel Ritz). The geographic focus of his works not the Deep South, but rather Nashville, Memphis, and a fictional town called Chatham, Tennessee.
Peter Taylor and his wife, poet Eleanor Ross Taylor, had two children a daughter, Katherine Baird. He died in 1994 at the age of 77 in Charlottesville, Virginia after suffering several strokes. His papers are held at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia.
Film Adaptations
- None
Further Reading
- The Complete Stories of Peter Taylor, compiled and published by Library of America in 2017.
Literary Context 1986-1987
- Nobel Prize for Literature (1986): awarded to Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka (1934-present) “who in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones fashions the drama of existence.” He was the first African recipient of the prize.
- National Book Award (1986): World’s Fair by E.L. Doctorow
- Booker Prize Winner (1986): The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis
- Per Publishers Weekly, the bestselling novel in 1986 was It by Stephen King. Other notable bestsellers that year included Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy and Larry Bond, Whirlwind by James Clavell, The Bourne Supremacy by Robert Ludlum, Last of the Breed by Louis L’Amour, The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy, and A Perfect Spy by John le Carré.
- In 1986, a major fire broke out at the Los Angeles Public Library destroying some 400,000 volumes.
- Nobody Lives For Ever, a James Bond continuation novel by John Gardner, was published.
- The Garden of Eden by Ernest Hemingway was published.
- Redwall by Brian Jacques was published.
- Dagon and Other Macabre Tales (corrected edition) by H. P. Lovecraft was published.
- The Reverse of the Medal by Patrick O’Brian was published.
- Speaker for the Dead, the sequel to Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, was published.
- Foundation and Earth by Isaac Asimov was published.
- Frank Miller’s graphic novel Batman: The Dark Knight Returns was published.
Did The Right Book Win?
Peter Taylor’s A Summons to Memphis often draws comparisons to other great 20th century works of Southern literature, particularly The Optimist’s Daughter by Eudora Welty (winner of the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction), especially since both novels concern a protagonist who returns home to the American South to tend to an aging parent. But I found Peter Taylor’s A Summons to Memphis to be a wonderfully simplistic, evocative, conversational, contemplative work whose prose reminded me in a few ways of earlier Pulitzer Prize-winners like Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie and even A Death in the Family by James Agee. However, A Summons to Memphis is also at times a frustratingly redundant work: our narrator Phillip often finds himself wandering through various digressions and repeating himself numerous times before contradicting prior stories he recounted. The fragmentary style creates an elaborate puzzle for the reader to solve. Regardless, I found A Summons to Memphis to be an immensely compelling novel. The beauty of reading through the Pulitzer Prize-winners is that one year, the Pulitzer will honor a huge sweeping epic like Lonesome Dove; and then the next, it will elevate a shorter, more reflective work like A Summons to Memphis. The diverse array of authors and styles makes this reading challenge particularly unpredictable and rewarding.
Taylor, Peter. A Summons to Memphis. Vintage International, a Division of Random House, Inc. New York, New York, republished in July 1999 (originally published in 1986). Dedicated to his wife and children Eleanor, Katie, and Ross with love.