Milking the Moon
A Southerner's Story of Life on This Planet
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD
This sumptuous oral biography of Eugene Walter, the best-known man you’ve never heard of, is an eyewitness history of the heart of the last century—enlivened with personal glimpses of luminaries from William Faulkner and Martha Graham to Judy Garland and Leontyne Price—and a pitch-perfect addition to the Southern literary tradition that has critics cheering.
In his 76 years, Eugene Walter ate of “the ripened heart of life,” to quote a letter from Isak Dinesen, one of his many illustrious friends. Walter savored the porch life of his native Mobile, Alabama, in the the l920s and ‘30s; stumbled into the Greenwich Village art scene in late-1940s New York; was a ubiquitous presence in Paris’s expatriate café society in the 1950s (where he was part of the Paris Review at its inception); and later, in 1960s Rome, participated in the golden age of Italian cinema. He was somehow everywhere, bringing with him a unique and contagious spirit, putting his inimitable stamp on the cultural life of the twentieth century.
“Katherine Clark…has edited Eugene Walter’s oral history into a book as amazing as the man himself.” JONATHAN YARDLEY, WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD
“Milking the Moon has perfect pitch and flawlessly captures Eugene’s pixilated wonderland of a life…. I love this book—and I couldn’t put it down.”
PAT CONROY
“Surprising and serendipitous.”
NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
“Anecdotes so frothy they ought to be served with a paper parasol over crushed ice.”
PEOPLE
“A rare literary treat…the temptation is to wolf it down all at once, but it’s much more satisfying to take your sweet time. The most unique oral history of the mid-twentieth century.”
TIMES-PICAYUNE (NEW ORLEANS)
“An exceptionally fun read.”
ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"I'm just a Southern boy let loose in the big world," declares Walter in his delightful oral autobiography, the culmination of months of talks with literature professor Clark (Motherwit: An Alabama Midwife's Story). Born in 1921 in Mobile, Ala., (which is, he notes, "a separate kingdom. We are not North America; we are North Haiti"), Walter spent most of his adulthood in New York, Paris and Rome, where he published a prize-winning novel (The Untidy Pilgrim, 1954), translated hundreds of screenplays, helped found the Paris Review, appeared in Fellini films and figured centrally in the social life of the literati, entertaining everyone from T.S. Eliot to Muriel Spark to Dylan Thomas at his lavish parties. Legendary both in his hometown and among the European jet set of the '50s and '60s, Walter displays an abiding fascination with people of all kinds. Astute and opinionated, he comments more on the personalities than the output of his literary associates. Unconcerned with material success or critical renown, Walter, who died in 1998, was in perennial pursuit of lively and provocative encounters with interesting people. In this respect, Clark observes, he's "so classically Southern as to be archetypal"; indeed, Walter, who traveled with a shoebox filled with Alabama red clay dirt, filters all his experiences through an explicitly Southern perspective that is alternately provincial and insightful. After her own encounters with him, Clark was convinced that his eccentric, ebullient voice was worth preserving, and indeed he comes through as one of the most fascinating literary figures most of us have never heard of. Photos not seen by PW.
