IN THE sensibilities of a discerning few, James Broughton for decades occupied a special place comparable to that of Jean Cocteau, Buster Keaton, Erik Satie and Edith Sitwell. As poet, film-maker, and playwright, he graced the San Francisco scene through its various and countless...

MARIETTA, Ohio-Broughton Foods has preserved its local identity, retained its work force and experienced top and bottom line growth despite two changes in ownership during the past six years. General manager Dave Broughton said heavy consolidation of the company's customer base was a...

By all odds, Winter Journey should not be a particularly successful novel. Its plot and characters are, on the surface anyway, fairly standard, if not trite. It's the story of a sensitive young man's coming of age, involving a voyage of discovery to—where else?—Rome, his ineffectual father left behind; his romance with a beautiful older woman, his music teacher; a friend who is a misunderstood homosexual; his mother's mysterious Italian lover; a tidy resolution, and so on....

[This] is what it is like to read "Winter Journey": It is the mid-1950's, and your assigned college roommate (if you're male) or your weekend blind date (if you're female), who at first has been enormously attractive; polite and even shy, but slightly intimidating in his restrained knowledgeability, decides you are sensitive and trustworthy, and for the rest of the night, over several cups of coffee, tells you his life story richly, seriously and intimately. It is the stor...

Winter Journey casts the mind, perhaps inevitably, back to Hawthorne's The Marble Faun: two Americans, seeking respite from masochistic relationships, and encountering aspects of themselves with which, in hope, they return to America…. The setting is Rome, disturbingly rich, "worn and yellowed," its "labyrinths" of intimacy and warmth, contrast sharply with the nervous egocentricity of their American characters. It becomes a subtly changing mirror of their moral dis...