A Darkening Green: Notes on Harvard, the 1950s, and the End of Innocence

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Description

It is a book about the end of childhood. Much of it is drawn instantly from a diary the writer kept whilst he was once a bright but insecure freshman at Harvard in the 1950s. From these pages emerges a precise description of the raw, half-understood experience of late adolescence-the anguish and arguments, the rivalry and anxiety about sex, the facile cynicism and desperate fumblings for purpose, the bull sessions held late at night-just as Peter Prescott recorded them only hours after the event. These diary excerpts are contained in a narrative that examines that freshman experience from a vantage point of twenty years. Thus, we may be able to look at the past with a double point of view: The exact record, unclouded by memory or nostalgia, of what was once said and done is set in a structure that reveals the form of the experience. The result is an ironic, witty, and steadily moving book. Writing with some compassion and even more asperity, Peter S. Prescott not only captures the conflicts and emotions of a single year, but probes beneath the surface of memory to explore certain tribal customs and rites of passage as they’re played out in the classrooms and living quarters of the college. A couple of famous people-T. S. Eliot and Edith Sitwell among them-play brief parts in this chronicle, but young Prescott’s attention was once primarily engaged in his struggle with his extravagant roommates and an assortment of eccentric undergraduates.

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