September Song: Stories

William Humphrey

feb 2015 · Open Road Media

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From one of America’s most acclaimed authors comes a masterful collection of bittersweet tales about the autumn of life

In the exquisite title story, seventy-six-year-old Virginia Tyler will finally marry the love of her life—as soon as she finds the courage to leave her husband of almost fifty years. In “The Apple of Discord,” a Hudson Valley farmer, heartsick that none of his three daughters or their husbands wants to keep the family orchard, commits an act of desperation.“Vissi d’Arte” is the poignant story of a husband whose belief that his wife is destined to become a world-famous painter borders on the delirious. In “A Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man,” an aging writer realizes that the young reporter sent from the big-city newspaper to interview him is gathering material for his obituary. The lies he tells her are a delicious act of defiance. 
 
By turns tender, funny, and sad, September Song is William Humphrey at his most eloquent and empathetic.

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.