Farther Off from Heaven: A Memoir

William Humphrey

feb 2015 · Open Road Media

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William Humphrey’s acclaimed memoir is a richly detailed portrait of small-town Texas and a poignant account of the tragedy that shaped the author’s life 

At three o’clock in the morning on July 5, 1937, William Humphrey awoke to his mother’s urgent cry: “Get dressed as quick as you can! Your daddy has been hurt.” Rushing to the doctor’s office, mother and son arrived to find Clarence Humphrey battered beyond recognition: his chest crushed, his face bruised black and caked with blood, his teeth shattered. He soon drew his final breath.
 
In that terrible moment, thirteen-year-old William knew that nothing would ever be the same again: “I felt slip from me in that moment not only the certainty of my future but the fixity of my past. It was as if I had been wakened out of my childhood.” He moved with his mother to Dallas soon after, and although he set his classic novels, Home from the Hill and The Ordways, in his hometown of Clarksville, he would not return for thirty-two years.
 
A masterpiece of autobiography, Farther Off from Heaven is the fiercely honest, exquisitely crafted story of William Humphrey’s childhood and the sudden end of his innocence.

This ebook features an illustrated biography of William Humphrey including rare photos form the author’s estate.

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William Humphrey (1924–1997) was born in Clarksville, Texas. Neither of his parents went to school beyond the fifth grade, and during the height of the Great Depression his father hunted in the snake-infested swamplands of the Sulphur River to help feed the family. Humphrey left Clarksville at age thirteen and did not return for thirty-two years. By then he was the internationally acclaimed author of two extraordinary novels set in his hometown: Home from the Hill, a National Book Award finalist that became an MGM film starring Robert Mitchum, and its follow-up, The Ordways, which the New York Times called “exhilaratingly successful.” Eleven highly praised works of fiction and nonfiction followed, including Farther Off from Heaven, a memoir about Humphrey’s East Texas boyhood and his father’s tragic death in an automobile accident; The Spawning Run and My Moby Dick, two delightful accounts of the joys and travails of fly fishing; and No Resting Place, a novel about the forced removal of the Cherokee nation along the Trail of Tears.

A longtime professor of English and writing at Bard College and other schools, Humphrey was the recipient of awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Texas Institute of Arts and Letters.