The Time Mom Met Hitler, Frost Came to Dinner, and I Heard the Greatest Story Ever Told

May 11, 2015
Throughout his life, Eberhart lived in the shadow of his father, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet laureate Richard Eberhart. But it wasn’t just his father who shaped his world. So did the literary giants who filled the family home during his youth, including Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsberg, and Sylvia Plath. The home near Dartmouth College, where Richard Eberhart taught, was filled with discussions and debates over not only poetry and philosophy, but also religion. Yet it wasn’t until after he became a father himself that Eberhart truly pondered the questions about religion that seeped into his soul. Initially, he found the answers he craved in Reform Judaism, but then at the age of 60 found the forgiveness he longed for in Christianity. Eberhart’s memoir, not surprisingly, will hold the most interest for those who are familiar with the literary community in which he swam as a child. The initial too-lengthy chapters of family history aside, Eberhart sketches a portrait of himself as a man coming to terms with his father and reconciling with his “ultimate Father” as well. Agent: Don Jacobson, D.C. Jacobson and Associates.

June 15, 2015
A memoir charting an artist's lifelong challenge to accept his calling. Eberhart was raised by a famous poet, Richard Eberhart, and surrounded in his youth by accomplished writers: e.e. cummings, Alan Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, and an impressive cast of others. In this often bemusing recounting of an unconventional upbringing, Eberhart describes a family that quietly, even unselfconsciously, displayed its own brand of eccentricity. His mother once met Hitler-a story he used to impress his childhood friends-and his great grandfather invented floor wax, which Eberhart's father sold for a time. Despite the high jinks, such an artistically sensitive environment could be frustrating for a young adolescent looking for something to rebel against. " 'I am at war with you!' I shouted. 'At war!' What Dad did about my shattering fury was to be Dad. 'Ah, youth, ' he glowed the next day and patted me on the back. 'What energy! What purity of emotion! What muscles! Hurrah!' This made it worse." The author struggled to accept his magnetic attraction to pursuing art as his life's work-a calling that was like family inheritance. He pursued theater before finally realizing that writing was the medium that most deeply inspired him. The book is a hybrid of dynamic parts; sometimes, Eberhart will digress to treat readers to a literary analysis of a famous poem (Robert Frost's "The Road Less Travelled" is a memorable instance) or to discuss the psychology behind an artist's work. For example, he furnishes a provocative but breezily anecdotal account of the way family friend T.S. Eliot's work was both elevated and limited by his traditionalism. The extraordinary arc of Eberhart's maturation-and coming to terms with his father's legacy-culminates in a religious conversion. After years of mining Judaism for spiritual succor, the author, along with his second wife, finally found peace of mind in Christianity. He explains with philosophical subtlety the ways in which submitting to one father, God himself, helped him reconcile with another, his poet dad. The path he took was a meandering one, like an epic poem. An often lighthearted but also profound recounting of a life in search of art and faith.

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