SCHLESINGER, Marian Cannon [Julia Child].
Snatched from Oblivion: A Cambridge Memoir.
Boston: Little, Brown and Company , 1979.
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First Edition of Snatched from Oblivion; Inscribed by Marian Cannon Schlesinger to Julia and Paul Child in the Year of Publication
First edition of Schlesinger's memoir of growing up in an academic household in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Octavo, original publisher's cloth with gilt titles to the spine, illustrated throughout. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author to Julia and Paul Child in the year of publication on the front free endpaper, "For Julia and Paul Child with affectionate regards from Marian Cannon Schlesinger April 1979." The recipients, Julia Carolyn Child and Paul Cushing Child shared with Marian Cannon Schlesinger (1912–2017) one of the more quietly remarkable neighborly friendships in the intellectual history of mid-century Cambridge, a triangle of cultivated, adventurous, and fiercely independent personalities who found themselves living within steps of one another on Irving Street at the precise moment when each was at the height of their respective powers. When Julia and Paul moved into 103 Irving Street in the summer of 1961, they joined a community that included Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Marian among their nearest neighbors, and the friendship that developed between the two households reflected the particular character of Cambridge intellectual life at its most convivial regular gatherings, shared meals, and the easy commerce of minds accustomed to one another's company. The connection between Julia and Marian was especially natural: both women were born in 1912, both were married to men whose careers shaped the terms of their early adult lives before each forged a formidable independent identity, Julia as America's most beloved culinary educator, Marian as a painter, memoirist, and one of Cambridge's most enduring civic presences. Marian later recalled Julia as someone who "ran the neighborhood," and remembered with evident pleasure the lunch she served her neighbor before Julia's final departure for California, a meal Julia praised with characteristic generosity as the most delicious thing she had ever tasted, a small anecdote that illuminates the warmth, mutual regard, and slightly competitive culinary spirit that characterized a friendship between two women whose shared Cambridge years coincided with some of the most productive and consequential decades of both their long and remarkable lives. Near fine in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Steve Snider.
Snatched from Oblivion: A Cambridge Memoir (1979) is the first memoir of Marian Cannon Schlesinger (1912–2017) — painter, author, Radcliffe graduate, former wife of historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., and one of Cambridge's most enduring and vivid intellectual presences — and a work that has quietly achieved the status of a minor classic of American memoir writing. The book tells the story of a community and way of life that have virtually disappeared, tracing Schlesinger's childhood in an academic Cambridge household dominated by high-spirited, independent women, and supplementing that core narrative with accounts of Cambridge characters, local politics, college life, and town-gown confrontations in the early decades of the twentieth century, all illustrated throughout with her own drawings. Her father was Professor of Physiology at Harvard Medical School and her mother a feminist writer, making the family household a microcosm of Cambridge intellectual life at its most formidable, and the memoir evokes that world with a wit and warmth that transcends local interest.
Snatched from Oblivion: A Cambridge Memoir.
$475.00
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