cover image Growing Up with Legends: A Literary Memoir

Growing Up with Legends: A Literary Memoir

Thomas E. Wright. Praeger Publishers, $35 (280pp) ISBN 978-0-275-96050-6

When at age 16 the author, now a 70-year-old travel writer who has lived for the past 20 years in Guatemala, met Allen Tate at the University of the South, there began what he terms ""the first of the living legends with whom I was destined to grow up."" First off, Wright offers a balance sheet of his personal characteristics when he arrived in New York City at age 19: ""blond, athletic attractiveness... intelligent, friendly, energetic [but] mainly homosexual [and] sexually repressed."" Aside from the fact that the title's legends are less than legendary for the most part (Speed Lankin, Gavin Lambert), Wright also discusses legends he never knew, explaining in some detail how he missed the chance to meet Truman Capote. Readers interested in the arcana of the minor literati of 1950s and '60s Manhattan and Southern California will find reasonably involving fare here, but Wright's episodes and observations center largely on himself, leading one to believe that he is the main legend. And for all the talk of legends, some of the more notable parts of the book center on descriptions of a sex scene in Morocco and Wright's participation in it. Photos not seen by PW. (Apr.)