U.S. Authors - 20th Century - Literary Biography, U.S. & Canadian Poetry - 20th Century - Literary Criticism

Black Mountain Days

Name: Black Mountain Days
Author: Michael Rumaker
ISBN: 9781933132662

by Michael Rumaker

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Overview

In Black Mountain Days, Michael Rumaker has written a touching, poetic memoir of Black Mountain College from 1952 to 1956. What were for the college its final four years were for Rumaker a sequence of journeys of creative and personal discovery that

About the Author, Michael Rumaker

Michael Rumaker is an American author (born March 5, 1932 in Philadelphia, PA), to Michael Joseph and Winifred Marvel Rumaker. He is a graduate of Black Mountain College (1955) and Columbia University (1970). Most of Rumaker's fiction concerns his life as a gay man. His first book, The Butterfly, is a fictionalized memoir of his brief affair with a young Yoko Ono, published before Ono became famous. His short stories, Gringos and Other Stories, appeared in 1967. A revised and expanded version appeared in 1991. He began to write directly about his life as a gay man in the volumes A Day and a Night at the Baths (1979) and MY FIRST SATYRNALIA (1981). The novel Pagan Days (1991) is told from the perspective of an eight-year old boy struggling to understand his gay self. BLACK MOUNTAIN DAYS, a memoir of his time at Black Mountain College, has a strong autobiographical element In addition, there are portraits of many students, faculty, and visitors (especially the poets Robert Creeley and Charles Olson) during its last years, 1952-1956.

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Editorials

Library Journal

America in the 1950s with its seductive books under lock and key in the library, unlawful abortions, and Southern segregation: this was the world that Rumaker (Pagan Days) inhabited while seeking out an education at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. As a gay man, the aspiring writer found refuge among the odd characters of his campus. Proceeding year by year, he describes those people and his experiences at this financially strapped institution where few students stuck it out long enough to graduate. Consequently, Rumaker made it, and his memoir is as much about his budding homosexuality as it is about his academic education. Although his tendency to use run-on sentences can make the story hard to follow, he makes adept use of imagery. For larger libraries only.-Terry Christner, Hutchinson P.L., KS Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.