Let Me Finish [Paperback]

Widely known as an original and graceful writer, Roger Angell has developed a devoted following through his essays in the New Yorker. Now, in Let Me Finish, a deeply personal, fresh form of autobiography, he takes an unsentimental look at his early days as a boy growing up in Prohibition-era New York with a remarkable father; a mother, Katharine White, who was a founding editor of the New Yorker; and a famous stepfather, the writer E. B. White.

Intimate, funny, and moving portraits form the books centerpiece as Angell remembers his surprising relatives, his early attraction to baseball in the time of Ruth and Gehrig and DiMaggio, and his vivid colleagues during a long career as a New Yorker writer and editor. Infused with pleasure and sadness, Angells disarming memoir also evokes an attachment to lifes better moments.

PRAISE FOR ROGER ANGELL AND LET ME FINISH

One of the most entertaining and gracious prose styles of his gracious generation. TIME

A lovely book and an honest one . . . it contains truths: about loyalty and love, about work and play, about getting on with the cards that life deals you. Its also a genuinely grown-up book, a rare gem indeed in our pubescent age. THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD

Romance
 
 
One spring Saturday when I was seven going on eight, my mother brought me with her on an automobile outing with her young lover and future husband, E. B. White. She took our family car, a slope­-­nosed Franklin sedan, and we must have met Andy by prearrangement at our garage. He did the driving. We left New York and went up into West­chester County for lunchthis was 1928 and it was still mostly country. On the way back, my mother, who had taken the wheel, stripped the gears while shifting, and we ground to a halt, halfway onto a shoulder of the Bronx River Parkway. Disaster. Andy thumbed a ride to go find a tow truck, and my mother, I now realize, was left to make this ilq