The Amateur: an Independent Life - Tapa dura

A renowned cultural observer and critic focuses on the intersection of art and experience in an intellectual memoir that describes coming of age in Berkeley, California, in the 1960s, the events that shaped her life, and the influences of film, theater, art, and literature on her life and work. 12,500 first printing. Tour.

ateur is an inquiry into how we discover our passions and how they discover us. "I am very conscious," writes Wendy Lesser, one of our shrewdest cultural observers, "of having made choices in my life. You can't plan how the choices will turn out. But you can certainly make them." In The Amateur Lesser explores some of the choices she has made in pursuit of an old-fashioned but indispensable vocation: an independent life of letters. She discusses the place--California--in which she grew up; the institutions-- Harvard, Cambridge, Berkeley--where she received her formal education; the writers, artists, and performers who deepened her critical understanding; and, finally, the literary journal she founded, The Threepenny Review, which she still edits and publishes out of the Berkeley apartment in which it began nearly twenty years ago.

Lesser describes both the events in her own life and those she has witnessed on stage, screen, canvas, and