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Eleanor Roosevelt as a child told lies 'for a number of years'; little Oliver Wendell Holmes had a phobia of ships and engaged in all
sorts of superstitious compulsions. Parents, and perhaps even children too, may take comfort in the knowledge that these and other 'disturbed' children whom they can learn about in this Reader turned out well after all. They can also learn here all sorts of other things not made clear in the writings of the professionals on childhood and adolescence. James Joyce conveys the eerie quality of two boy's encounter with a soft-spoken, confused old pervert, and Charles Jackson shows the effect produced upon children by the sudden arrival at their house of an unheard-of down-and-out uncle. Harold Brodkey and William Shakespeare portray in very different ways the fierce unhappiness of a child abandoned it seems by those he relies upon to help him meet the alluring terror of first love… How do they know these things so well? Why writers and artists understand psychology so much better than students of the subject (including psychoanalysts) is an unanswered question taken note of by Freud himself. This Reader makes clear once again that they do.
This is a remarkably good book, by no means to be enjoyed only by parents. The selections, which illustrate various times and happenings of childhood and adolescence, come from widely various sources (stories, novels, poems, plays, autobiographies) and are long enough to be satisfying. Perhaps their greatest merit is that they suggest to us where to look for more, and who would have thought of turning to the writings of such people as Charles Chaplin, Jr. or Winston Churchill for delicate portraits of childhood?
Anna Wolf, who always writes well, seems herself to have been touched by the magical sensitivity of the writers in this anthology, and her introductions to the groups of selections are more than ever perceptive and clear,—and sometimes, moreover, unique, for some of them touch upon affa