Chasing Shadows: Memoirs of a Sixties Survivor

As a college student in the 1960s, Wilcox determined to experience everything--""become a cricket or an oak tree,"" ""argue with the moon,"" live ""life's mystery."" To his working-class parents in Iowa, however, his desire to be a poet meant he must be crazy, and they sent him to psychiatric hospitals for observation, pills and shock treatments. Eventually he left Iowa and began chasing shadows, first in San Francisco and then in Manhattan, where he lived a hand-to-mouth existence on the Lower East Side with hippies, junkies, winos and various wayward girlfriends. Wilcox (Uncommon Martyrs: How the Berrigans & Friends Are Turning Swords into Plowshares) impressionistically describes his frenetic life on the streets of New York City, the characters he met there and his unsuccessful attempts to hold down odd jobs. Interspersed are harrowing accounts of his experiences in mental institutions and scathing outbursts of resentment toward his mother. In the last chapter, he comes to terms with, and almost forgives, his parents, but the end is a letdown; the heart of this funny, sensitive and disquieting book is in Wilcox's depiction of the angry, manic world of the '60s. (Oct.)