288 pages
23 photographs
“Croswell Bowen was a man full of contradictions, and life did not always deal him a fair hand. Difficult he sometimes may have been, but you cannot take away his talent as a writer and reporter or fault his generosity of spirit. He deserves not to be forgotten, and thanks to this loving and eloquent portrait by his oldest daughter, he won’t be.”—Robert Cowley, author and founding editor of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History
“Walking the tricky line between biography and memoir with aplomb, Betsy Connor Bowen paints a portrait of her New Deal liberal photo-reporter father that shows him in his literary glory but with his flaws as well—which makes him all the more intriguing. Fascinating and heart-breaking.”—Heath Lee, author of Winnie Davis: Daughter of the Lost Cause
“This book is an homage to all those who, like Croswell Bowen, dare to face the blank page, who live from one story to the next in order to understand and articulate the world they know—and, ideally, script a better one. An engrossing must-read for aspiring and veteran journalists alike.”—Stacey Chase, freelance writer for the Boston Globe and Globe Magazine, the Christian Science Monitor, and Newsweek
List of Illustrations
Prologue
1. Skull and Bones, Paris, and the Crash of 1929
2. Several Reversals of Fortune, All in a Row
3. Greenwich Village Years
4. Bowen’s New Deal
5. Bowen’s Short War
6. The Long War on the Home Front
7. Ahab in Seersucker
8. The Fifties and Its Discontents
9. A Darkness That Would Not Lift
10. A Writer Attends to His Soul
Acknowledgments
A Note on Sources
