Striking Through the Masks: A Literary Memoir

California: Capitola Books, Santa Cruz, 2008. First edition. Large quarto in pictorial jacket; red cloth-wrapped boards with gilt stamping; xvii, 589 pages: illustrations, portraits; 24 cm As new. Hardcover. ISBN: 0932319084

"From his family background in the world of Brooklyn's Jewish gangsters to his early years in a succession of boarding schools, and from the rough streets of New York City in the 1940s to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district in the 1960s, poet Morton Marcus tells the story of his growth from embattled youth to uneasy adulthood. Filled with a rogues gallery of colorful characters and numerous anecdotes, as well as descriptions of travels in Greece, Australia, Tahiti, Croatia, and the Czech Republic, Striking Through the Masks conjures up the last half of the twentieth century and the opening decade of the new millenium." --Jacket. Features stories about Richard Nixon, Czeslaw Milosz, Lou Harrison, Raymond Carver, and Charles Simic. // memoir, autobiography, poetry, Haight-Ashbury, literature, poetry