CORNWALL –Francine Prose, author of “1974, A Personal History,” will appear in conversation with author Roxana Robinson at the Cornwall Library at 4 p.m.
Prose’s book is a haunting new memoir about her youth in the 1970s and of coming of age in counterculture America.
Registration is required for the in-person presentation. Copies of the book will be available for sale and signing.
In “1974,” Prose tells of a close but troubled interlude with a man who had helped leak the secret Pentagon Papers in 1971. She describes our country in the midst of radical social change, and what it was like to be a young woman in San Francisco then, an aspiring writer and Joni Mitchell fan with strong emotions and political convictions.
In 1974, Prose was 26, had divorced her husband, dropped out of graduate school at Harvard and fled to the West Coast. She had already published her first novel when she met economist and engineer Tony Russo, who was a hero to many for his Pentagon Papers role and his jail time for refusing to testify about it.
The papers proved, in Prose’s words, “…what the antiwar movement had never been able to prove. Our presence in Vietnam was unwanted. We’d committed war crimes.” Prose saw Russo as a counterculture and free-speech hero, and as “antiwar royalty.” But the ensuing relationship between them, which was never quite an affair, proved difficult.
By the time Prose met him, Russo was paranoid and unemployed. “An aura of unease surrounded him, the faint distressing buzz of an electrical panel with a burnt fuse and some wires pulled loose.” She organizes her narrative around nights spent with Russo, driving manically around San Francisco, listening to his stories, which she describes as having confusing chronologies and often impossible to follow. His paranoia often involved the FBI. Prose and Russo eventually had a disturbing and dramatic parting.
Prose is now a distinguished, award-winning American novelist, short story writer, essayist and critic, the author of 20 novels and much nonfiction. She is a visiting professor at Bard College, a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, and formerly president of PEN American Center.
Roxana Robinson, who will introduce and be in conversation with Prose, is the author of seven novels, three collections of short stories, and the definitive biography of Georgia O’Keeffe. Four of these were chosen as New York Times Notable Books, three as New York Times Editors’ Choices. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker and many other magazines and has been widely anthologized and broadcast on NPR.
