This mature, exquisite collection of personal essays by Hilary Masters offers a rare pleasure. Here are meditations and reflections distilled in fine prose from a long and varied life—musings that, in the distinguished tradition of essays carried on since the days of Montaigne, articulate the piquant insights of the writer’s experience. In this collection, one of the most illustrious contemporary essayists transfigures incidents and observations into something far more—a finely crafted window into the workings of experience and memory.   

 

Masters makes readers privy to a youthful love affair; an adolescent’s discovery in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe of the key to an immigrant grandfather’s plight; and the significance of growing trees, making gravy, and playing cards. He draws intimate portraits of such characters as his famous father, Edgar Lee Masters; his literary friends Wright Morris and William Humphrey; and the strangers who both complicated and enriched his life. In glimpses of moments from naive youth through heady young adulthood to aging maturity, these essays tell the story of a life deeply, broadly, and thoroughly lived.

Hilary Masters has been publishing novels, short fiction, and nonfiction since the 1960s, and his work has been cited in Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays, and Pushcart Prize anthologies. In 2003 the American Academy of Arts and Letters gave his work its award for literature. His most recent publications include the novel Elegy for Sam Emerson and the book-length essay, Shadows on a Wall: Juan O’Gorman and the Mural in Patzcuaro. Best known for his memoir, Last Stands: Notes from Memory, Masters is also the author of, most recently, How the Indians Buried Their Dead, a collection of short stories.

"Masters remains a masterful essayist and storyteller, capable of capturing a world and a world view by looking at himself."—Glenn C. Altschuler, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“There are very few practitioners of the personal essay today who can commandeer such wide perspectives, such insight and balance as Hilary Masters. He starts off from a small, everyday subject or object and works his way into a much larger purview. In Rooms of Memory is one of the strongest personal essay collections in recent years—it is supremely companionable, ‘user friendly,’ and engrossing and amusing throughout. Every year sees a brace of excellent new memoirs , but there are only about a dozen personal essay collections published, mostly by younger writers, and none that I can think of that has the burnished, distilled wisdom of this book.”—Phillip Lopate, author of The Art of the Personal Essay

“Because of his age, broad experience, travels, open-hearted curiosity, and knowledge, Hilary Masters’s book, In Rooms of Memory, has the kind of reflective depth that few such collections possess. It is gorgeously written and organized, a book of connections—between self and other, past and present, art and life.”—Floyd Skloot, author of In the Shadow of Memory