Cheerful money : me, my family, and the last days of WASP splendor
Tad Friend's family is nothing if not illustrious: his father was president of Swarthmore College, and at Smith his mother came in second to Sylvia Plath in a poetry contest judged by W.H. Auden. For centuries, WASPs like his ancestors dominated American life. But then, in the '60s, their fortunes began to fall. As a young man, Friend noticed that his family tree, for all its glories, was full of alcoholics, depressives, and reckless eccentrics. Yet his identity had already been shaped by the family's age-old traditions and expectations. Part memoir, part family history, and part cultural study of the long swoon of the American WASP, Cheerful Money is a captivating examination of a cultural crack-up and a man trying to escape its wreckage.--From publisher description
Print Book, English, 2009
Little, Brown and Co., New York, 2009