| Paul Engle's A Lucky American Childhood, the twelfth volume in Iowa's Singular Lives series, differs from its predecessors in many respects, most notably in being unabashedly a paean to childhood and adolescence. There is, in addition, the matter of fame. The young Paul, though born to a working-class family in a modest neighborhood of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, became the future Paul Engle, an American poet of international renown, especially in the thirties (Worn Earth, American Song, Break the Heart's Anger) and forties and fifties (Poems in Praise and other collections). He was as well the famous director of the Writers' Workshop and the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. The list of leading authors who counted him friend and literary equal is indeed impressive. |
| Even more than Ray Young Bear and Gary Gildner, poets and authors of Black Eagle Child and The Warsaw Sparks in this series, Paul Engle earned fame by celebrating his midwestern roots. Iowa now stands in his lyrics as "the great west country of our destiny." Now in a posthumous memoir he matches in prose the nostalgic energy that once made him the younger colleague of Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg. A Lucky American Childhood is little less than a tour de force of imaginative recall. Readers will savor a succession of vividly recaptured experiences and emotions of family, city, and countryside. Engle's is a personal and social history recalling other notable American autobiographies of boyhood and girlhood, beginning with those of Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain, and John Muir and coming more recently to the life-stories of, among others, Russell Baker, Maya Angelou, Frank Conroy, and Susan Allen Toth. |
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