The Happy Marriage: And Other Stories

R. V. Cassill

2014 abe. · Open Road Media

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Beautifully rendered and psychologically astute tales of life, family, and art from a true American master

“The Sunday Painter,” a surprisingly comic tale, is the account of an amateur artist whose obsession with distilling his work to its most basic form—light—leads to a mental breakdown. “The First Day of School” is a moving and intimately observed portrait of the courage summoned by an African American family in the early days of integration. In “The Covenant,” a thirteen-year-old boy is confronted with his own mortality and instinctually redirects his anger and confusion elsewhere—the first lesson of adulthood. Beneath the deceptively anecdotal narration of “The Swimmers at Pallikula” lie deep truths about the absurdity of life and death and the eternal struggle for self-knowledge.As the editor of The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, a founder of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP), and a longtime teacher at the University of Iowa, Purdue University, and Brown University, R. V. Cassill influenced generations of American authors. In The Happy Marriage and Other Stories, this expert craftsman is at his most varied and vital.
 

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R. V. Cassill (1919­–2002) was a prolific and award-winning author and a highly regarded writing teacher. Among his best-known works are the novels Clem Anderson and Doctor Cobb’s Game and the short stories “The Father” and “The Prize,” the latter of which won him an O. Henry Award. At the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Purdue University, and Brown University, Cassill taught many acclaimed authors, including Joy Williams and Raymond Carver. He founded the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) in 1967 and after his retirement became the editor of TheNorton Anthology of Short Fiction, a position he held for nearly a quarter century.