A Frieze of Girls: Memoirs as Fiction (Sweetwater Fiction: Reintroductions)

A Frieze of Girls speaks with a fresh voice from an American era long past. This is more than Allan Seager's story of what happened; it is also about how "the feel of truth is very like the feel of fiction, especially when either is at all strange."Seager gives us his coming-of-age story, from a high-school summer as a sometime cowboy in the Big Horn mountains to a first job at seventeen managing an antiquated factory in Memphis to a hard-drinking scholarship year in Oxford, cut short by tuberculosis. At once funny with an undercurrent of pain, the stories in A Frieze of Girls remind us of the realities we create to face the world and the past, and in turn of the realities of the world we must inevitably also confront. "Time makes fiction out of our memories," writes Seager. "We all have to have a self we can live with and the operation of memory is artistic---selecting, suppressing, bending, touching up, turning our actions inside out so that we can have not necessarily a likable, merely a plausible identity." A Frieze of Girls is Allan Seager at the top of his form, and a reminder that great writing always transcends mere fashion.Allan Seager was Professor of English at the University of Michigan and author of many highly praised short stories and novels, including Amos Berry. He died in Tecumseh, Michigan, in 1968. Novelist Charles Baxter is the author of Saul and Patsy. Front Cover......Page 1 Title Page......Page 4 Copyright......Page 5 Introduction - Charles Baxter......Page 6 Contents......Page 12 Preface......Page 14 I Under the Big Magnolia Tree......Page 18 II Powder River in the Old Days......Page 34 III Game Chickens......Page 54 IV "Dear Old Shrine, Our Hearts Round Thee Twine ''......Page 72 V The Nicest Girl in Cook County......Page 96 VI Actress with Red Garters......Page 112 VII Miss Anglin's Bad Martini......Page 138 VIII The Old Man, a Nineteenth-Century Steel Engraving......Page 158 IX The Scholarship......Page 176 X The Drinking Contest......Page 188 XI The joys of Sport at Oxford......Page 208 XII The Cure......Page 226 XII The Last Return......Page 246 About the Author......Page 264 Back Cover......Page 265 A Frieze of Girls speaks with a fresh voice from an American era long past. This is more than Allan Seager's story of what happened; it is also about how "the feel of truth is very like the feel of fiction, especially when either is at all strange." Seager gives us his coming-of-age story, from a high-school summer as a sometime cowboy in the Big Horn mountains to a first job at seventeen managing an antiquated factory in Memphis to a hard-drinking scholarship year in Oxford, cut short by tuberculosis. At once funny with an undercurrent of pain, the stories in A Frieze of Girls remind us of the realities we create to face the world and the past, and in turn of the realities of the world we must inevitably also confront. 'Time', writes Seager. 'makes fiction out of our memories'. The author tells his coming-of-age story and simultaneously investigates the artistic ways in which we alter our memories, to create a self we can live with. Shimmering Style And Elegance--with A Dark Side--from A First-rate But Often-overlooked American Writer The coltish pursuits of a Southern youngster during the Prohibition era. 13 autobiographical sketches.