Unframed Originals

In this haunting, elegantly written memoir, W. S. Merwin recalls in utterly unsentimental prose his youth, growing up in a repressed Presbyterian household in the small river towns of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The complex portrait that emerges of a family without language or history, transforms the story of their isolated lives into the development of a writer's conscience and a warning about the fate of a middle class eager to obliterate origins.

"This book is superbly written, offering deep glimpses into the complexities and mysteries of family bonds, with just that distancing from people and events necessary for artistic control."—Edmund Fuller, Wall Street JournalW. S. Merwin is one of our most distinguished poets and translators and is the acting United States Poet Laureate. A two–time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, he has also been honored with the Bollingen Prize and a Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets. In 1995 he received the first Dorothea Tanning Prize. He lives and works in Hawaii.