Atop an Underwood

Table Of Contents

Introduction
Part One: Pine Forests and Pure Thought 1936-1940
from Background
Repulsion May Race Here in Exhibition Feature!!
from Football Novella
Jack Lewis’s Baseball Chatter
[One Long Strange Dream]
Count Basie’s Band Best in Land; Group Famous for “Solid” Swing
Go Back
Nothing
A Play I Want to Write
Concentration
We Thronged
[A Day in September]
[I Know I Am August]
Radio Script: The Spirit of ’14
[I Remember the Days of My Youth]
from Raw Rookie Nerves
Where the Road Begins
New York Nite Club—
Part Two: An Original Kicker 1941
from Background
There’s Something About a Cigar
God
If I Were Wealthy
[One Sunday Afternoon in July]
The Birth of a Socialist
No Connection: A Novel That I Don’t Intend to Finish
On the Porch, Remembering
The Sandbank Sage
Farewell Song, Sweet from My Trees
[I Have to Pull Up My Stakes and Roll, Man]
Odyssey (Continued)
[At 18, I Suddenly Discovered the Delight of Rebellion]
Observations
Definition of a Poet
America in the Night
Woman Going to Hartford
Old Love-Light
I Tell You It Is October!
[Here I Am at Last with a Typewriter]
[Atop an Underwood: Introduction]
The Good Jobs
From Radio City to the Crown
…The Little Cottage by the Sea…
The Juke Box is Saving America
…Hartford After Work….
…Legends and Legends….
…A Kerouac That Turned Out Sublime….
The Father of My Father
Credo
…Hungry Young Writer’s Notebook….
A Young Writer’s Notebook
[I Am Going to Stress a New Set of Values]
[I Am My Mother’s Son]
[Howdy!]
Today
This I Do Know—
Search by Night
Part Three: To Portray Life Accurately 1942-1943
from Background
Sadness at Six
The Joy of Duluoz
Famine for the Heart
[The Very Thing I Live For]
The Mystery
Thinking of Thomas Wolfe on a Winter’s Night
from The Sea Is My Brother (Merchant Mariner)
Beauty as a Lasting Truth
My Generation, My World
The Wound of Living
Wounded in Action
The Romanticist
The Boy from Philadelphia
The Two Americans
Acknowledgments