Prospero's Son: Life, Books, Love, and Theater

Seth Lerer

Apr 2013 · University of Chicago Press

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In this “absorbing and moving” memoir, a scholar of children’s literature considers the relationship between fathers and sons, and between literature and life (Kenneth Gross, author of Puppet).

Through elliptical memories and reflections, Seth Lerer delves into his own evolution from boyhood to fatherhood, as well as his intellectual evolution through his lifelong love of reading. While presenting an intimate portrait of Lerer’s life, Prospero’s Son is about the power of books and theater, the excitement of stories in a young man’s life, and the transformative magic of words and performance.

Lerer’s father, a teacher and lifelong actor, comes to terms with his life as a gay man. Meanwhile, Lerer himself grows from bookish boy to professor of literature and an acclaimed expert on the very children’s books that set him on his path. Only then does he learn how hard it is to be a father—and how much books can, and cannot, instruct him.

Throughout these intertwined accounts of changing selves, Lerer returns again and again to stories—the ways they teach us about discovery, deliverance, forgetting, and remembering.

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Seth Lerer is dean of arts and humanities at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of many books, including the National Book Critics Circle Award–winning Children's Literature: A Readers; History from Aesop to Harry Potter.