Confessions of a Spent Youth: A Novel

Vance Bourjaily

2015년 4월 · Open Road Media

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In this masterwork of confessional literature, a man approaching middle age recalls his impetuous youth with fondness, remorse, and astonishment

Spanning the years 1939 to 1946, this is the story of a defining era in one man’s life and an exhilarating tribute to the entire generation that came of age during World War II.
 
Quince’s youthful adventures begin with his first sexual encounter, a night with a girl named Moomie in a one-room cabin in Virginia, and end with the twenty-four-year-old veteran settling down to his postwar future. In between, he falls in and out of love with dozens of women, drinks and drugs his way through two years of college and four years of military service, travels the world, and meets a dazzling array of colorful characters.
 
In a voice both beguiling and sincere, an older, wiser Quince narrates his escapades in search of the truth about who he was and who he has become. One of the finest novels of mid-twentieth-century America, Confessions of a Spent Youth is poignant, witty, and profound.
 

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Vance Bourjaily (1922–2010) was born in Cleveland, Ohio. His father, a Lebanese immigrant, was a journalist, and his mother wrote romance novels. Raised in New York and Virginia, Bourjaily interrupted his studies at Bowdoin College to serve in the Second World War, first as an ambulance driver for the American Field Service and later as an army infantryman in occupied Japan. Legendary editor Maxwell Perkins commissioned Bourjaily’s debut novel, The End of My Life, while he was still in the army, and the book is widely considered to be one of the finest accounts of World War II in American literature. Bourjaily’s many other acclaimed works include The Violated, Confessions of a Spent Youth, and Brill Among the Ruins, a nominee for the National Book Award.

A longtime teacher at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Arizona, Bourjaily was the first director of the master of fine arts program in creative writing at Louisiana State University.