"If an unhappy childhood is indispensible for a writer, I am ill-equipped: I missed out on all that and was neither deprived nor unloved," (Chapter 1, p. 1).

"The month of August was four solid weeks of heaven. Father took exactly one month's vacation, always the month of August. July was a waiting time at 101 Summit Avenue—sultry summer nights in a hammock on the screened porch, games in the street just before dark, the smell of honeysuckle and of the dust laid by the sprinkling cart. Families stayed together in that innocent era—the young were less apt than they are now to go off on their own or to take a summer job. Resort places always had a liberal supply of young bucks in ice cream pants and young girls in pretty frocks. America's nomadic life had not begun—the campers and the trailers and...