The Fair Fields

A memoir-in-vignettes recalling a poet’s early years and memories from a literary household.

More than a consecutive memoir, The Fair Fields presents a set of linked vignettes about what it was like to grow up in a white, liberal, literary household in Connecticut in the 1950s and early 1960s. Readers will meet characters they probably recognize, including Rosanna Warren’s parents—writers Robert Penn Warren and Eleanor Clark—and their friends: authors, visual artists, musicians, editors, and publishers.

The narrative tracks Rosanna’s early childhood to young womanhood, taking in along the way visions of neolithic Brittany, Roman ruins in southern France, the French Revolution, the Algerian War, and the throes of the American civil rights movement in the 1960s. As much as a personal story, it’s a set of portraits from a certain gallery of post–World War II American intellectual life. It also tells the tale of a young artist finding her way from painting, her first vocation, to a life in writing.