Jeannette Walls last visited the setting of her inspiring, best-selling memoir, The Glass Castle, just after the novel was published in 2005. "The house is gone, the foundations are gone. I can see the remnants of what used to be the stairs, but I found some things," she said. "I'm pretty sure that this was my mom's art supplies."
It was how she overcame the poverty, the chaos of her childhood, here on a hillside above Welch, a struggling coal mining town in southern West Virginia, that the book (and now a film based on it) portrays. "I will never forget it. I tried!" Walls laughed. "I tried and it didn't work. So you remember, not out of anger, but out of gratitude, that you can start at a place like that and make your way out."
She triumphed in spite of her parents, and because of them. "My father, Rex, was one of the most charismatic human beings I've ever known, and also one of the most brilliant. He was also a desperate alcoholic," said Walls. "My mother, Rose Mary, is also brilliant, creative, and I don't think has a maternal bone in her body."
Played in the movie by Naomi Watts, Rose Mary Walls preferred painting to tending her four children, or working. Rex Walls, played by Woody Harrelson, couldn't keep a job, but dreamed big, of building a fabulous, solar-powered Glass Castle. Jeannette was also a true believer, until the foundation she helped dig became a garbage pit. "I didn't have indoor plumbing. I'd go to school dirty. I didn't have lunches. I literally went through the garbage to forage food."
" Once I became the editor of the school newspaper, I had a key to the school, and I went to the school cafeteria and just took the food they threw away." She put together the school paper at the offices of the Welch Daily News. The experience was transformative. "It was the portal out for me," she said. "It was the time and place that I realized I had a future."
When Walls was 17, she ran away to New York City, and talked herself into the prestigious Barnard College. She graduated with honors and then went to work at New York magazine. "It was such a life-changer," she said, "because it wasn't just part of the real world, it was the big time." Her job, ironically, was society gossip columnist.
"I just thought, if they knew who I was, the game would be up. I was this white trash kid reporting on the world's most famous, powerful people." She had a fancy address on Park Avenue, and was silent about her background. But by then, her parents had shown up in New York City and were living as squatters in a derelict building. They appeared in a 1989 documentary, "How to Squash a Squat."
"I was going to some fabulous party," Walls recalled, "and my taxi got stuck in traffic, and I looked out the window and I saw a homeless woman rooting through the garbage, and I realized it was my mother. And I was so mortified that I ducked down, and I hid." That story opens The Glass Castle. The book has sold more than six million copies and the movie version opened to critical acclaim in August 2017.
Academy Award-winner Brie Larson is the grown-up Jeannette. Larson said, "I've learned a lot from her. Being open about who you are in your story, the book has sparked people to reflect on their own lives, to come to terms with their past."
With unconditional love, Jeannette Walls has found beauty in the struggle. These days, she lives with her husband, John Taylor, also a writer, on their 200-acre farm in Virginia. She built a small house for her mother, who at 84 still paints, and makes no apologies for the way she raised her children. "They had a more interesting life," Rose Mary said. "They had experiences nobody else had, so why in the world complain?"
.
Rex Walls died in 1994. His plans for the Glass Castle have long since been lost. But Jeannette Walls no longer minds that it was only ever a dream. "In another way, though, I feel that it kind of has been built," Walls said. "Because it was never really about the Glass Castle. It was more just a home, a place where you belong."
And, she added, "I've got that, and more."
It was how she overcame the poverty, the chaos of her childhood, here on a hillside above Welch, a struggling coal mining town in southern West Virginia, that the book (and now a film based on it) portrays. "I will never forget it. I tried!" Walls laughed. "I tried and it didn't work. So you remember, not out of anger, but out of gratitude, that you can start at a place like that and make your way out."
She triumphed in spite of her parents, and because of them. "My father, Rex, was one of the most charismatic human beings I've ever known, and also one of the most brilliant. He was also a desperate alcoholic," said Walls. "My mother, Rose Mary, is also brilliant, creative, and I don't think has a maternal bone in her body."
Played in the movie by Naomi Watts, Rose Mary Walls preferred painting to tending her four children, or working. Rex Walls, played by Woody Harrelson, couldn't keep a job, but dreamed big, of building a fabulous, solar-powered Glass Castle. Jeannette was also a true believer, until the foundation she helped dig became a garbage pit. "I didn't have indoor plumbing. I'd go to school dirty. I didn't have lunches. I literally went through the garbage to forage food."
" Once I became the editor of the school newspaper, I had a key to the school, and I went to the school cafeteria and just took the food they threw away." She put together the school paper at the offices of the Welch Daily News. The experience was transformative. "It was the portal out for me," she said. "It was the time and place that I realized I had a future."
When Walls was 17, she ran away to New York City, and talked herself into the prestigious Barnard College. She graduated with honors and then went to work at New York magazine. "It was such a life-changer," she said, "because it wasn't just part of the real world, it was the big time." Her job, ironically, was society gossip columnist.
"I just thought, if they knew who I was, the game would be up. I was this white trash kid reporting on the world's most famous, powerful people." She had a fancy address on Park Avenue, and was silent about her background. But by then, her parents had shown up in New York City and were living as squatters in a derelict building. They appeared in a 1989 documentary, "How to Squash a Squat."
"I was going to some fabulous party," Walls recalled, "and my taxi got stuck in traffic, and I looked out the window and I saw a homeless woman rooting through the garbage, and I realized it was my mother. And I was so mortified that I ducked down, and I hid." That story opens The Glass Castle. The book has sold more than six million copies and the movie version opened to critical acclaim in August 2017.
Academy Award-winner Brie Larson is the grown-up Jeannette. Larson said, "I've learned a lot from her. Being open about who you are in your story, the book has sparked people to reflect on their own lives, to come to terms with their past."
With unconditional love, Jeannette Walls has found beauty in the struggle. These days, she lives with her husband, John Taylor, also a writer, on their 200-acre farm in Virginia. She built a small house for her mother, who at 84 still paints, and makes no apologies for the way she raised her children. "They had a more interesting life," Rose Mary said. "They had experiences nobody else had, so why in the world complain?"
.
Rex Walls died in 1994. His plans for the Glass Castle have long since been lost. But Jeannette Walls no longer minds that it was only ever a dream. "In another way, though, I feel that it kind of has been built," Walls said. "Because it was never really about the Glass Castle. It was more just a home, a place where you belong."
And, she added, "I've got that, and more."
THOMAS C. FOSTER grew up in West Cornfield, Ohio. He has said about his childhood community, "Don’t look for it on a map; it’s unincorporated. When you have a cornfield for a backyard, soybeans across the road, and no classmates for a mile in any direction, books become your friends. And my greatest friend was the bookmobile, that traveling chunk of library that is truly a gift of the gods."
Foster studied English at Dartmouth University and then Michigan State University. He taught literature and writing starting in 1975, the last twenty-seven years at the University of Michigan-Flint before retiring at the end of 2014. In that time, he said, "I learned more about literature from my students than in all the classes I ever took. Amazing what questions, explanations, and the odd doubting look can accomplish."
Based on his classroom experiences, Foster wrote How to Read Literature Like a Professor, a New York Times bestseller that was published in 2003. The author suggests interpretations of themes, motifs, and possible symbols commonly found in literature. The book brands itself as "A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines." In light of the work's popularity, Foster followed his book with the sequels, How to Read Novels Like a Professor in 2008 and How To Read Literature Like A Professor for Kids in 2013.
Foster studied English at Dartmouth University and then Michigan State University. He taught literature and writing starting in 1975, the last twenty-seven years at the University of Michigan-Flint before retiring at the end of 2014. In that time, he said, "I learned more about literature from my students than in all the classes I ever took. Amazing what questions, explanations, and the odd doubting look can accomplish."
Based on his classroom experiences, Foster wrote How to Read Literature Like a Professor, a New York Times bestseller that was published in 2003. The author suggests interpretations of themes, motifs, and possible symbols commonly found in literature. The book brands itself as "A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines." In light of the work's popularity, Foster followed his book with the sequels, How to Read Novels Like a Professor in 2008 and How To Read Literature Like A Professor for Kids in 2013.
TIM O'Brien was drafted for military service in 1968, two weeks after completing his undergraduate degree at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he had enrolled in 1964. He earned a bachelor's degree in government and politics. An excellent student, O'Brien looked forward to attending graduate school and studying political science. During the course of his college career, O'Brien came to oppose the war, not as a radical activist but as a campaign supporter and volunteer of Eugene McCarthy, a candidate in the 1968 presidential election who was openly against the Vietnam War.
O'Brien hated the war and thought it was wrong, and he often thought about fleeing to Canada. Unlike his fictional alter ego in The Things They Carried, however, he did not attempt it. Instead, O'Brien yielded to what he has described as a pressure from his community to let go of his convictions against the war and to participate — not only because he had to but also because it was his patriotic duty, a sentiment that he had learned from his community and his parents, who met in the Navy during World War II.
O'Brien ultimately answered the call of the draft and was sent to Army basic training at Fort Lewis, Washington. He was later assigned to advanced individual training and soon found himself in Vietnam, assigned to Firebase LZ Gator, south of Chu Lai. O'Brien served a 13-month tour in-country from 1969 to 1970 with Alpha Company, the Fifth Battalion of the 46th Infantry, 198th Infantry Brigade, Americal Division. He was a regular foot soldier, or, as commonly referred to in veterans' slang, a "grunt," serving in such roles as rifleman and radio telephone operator. He was wounded twice while in service and was relatively safe during the final months of his tour when he was assigned to jobs in the rear. O'Brien ultimately rose to the rank of sergeant.
When he returned to the United States, he studied intermittently at Harvard University and worked for the Washington Post (1971–74) as an intern and reporter. He collected his newspaper and magazine articles about his war experiences in his first book, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (1973). By turns meditative and brutally realistic, it was praised for its honest portrayal of a soldier’s emotions.
The Vietnam War is present in many of O’Brien’s novels. One of the two protagonists in Northern Lights (1975) is a wounded war hero. Set in an isolated, snow-covered part of Minnesota during a disastrous cross-country ski trip, the novel is an examination of courage. Going After Cacciato (1978), which won a National Book Award, follows both a soldier who abandons his platoon in Vietnam to try to walk to Paris and a fellow infantryman who escapes the war’s horrors by inventing elaborate fantasies about his journey. In The Things They Carried (1990), a fictional narrator named Tim O’Brien begins his memoir with a description of the items that the members of his platoon took to war, which range from physical objects, such as weapons and love letters, to emotions of terror and homesickness. While a man’s lifelong fear of dying from a nuclear bombing is the subject of The Nuclear Age (1981), In the Lake of the Woods (1994) returns to the subject of the experiences and effects of the Vietnam War.
O'Brien hated the war and thought it was wrong, and he often thought about fleeing to Canada. Unlike his fictional alter ego in The Things They Carried, however, he did not attempt it. Instead, O'Brien yielded to what he has described as a pressure from his community to let go of his convictions against the war and to participate — not only because he had to but also because it was his patriotic duty, a sentiment that he had learned from his community and his parents, who met in the Navy during World War II.
O'Brien ultimately answered the call of the draft and was sent to Army basic training at Fort Lewis, Washington. He was later assigned to advanced individual training and soon found himself in Vietnam, assigned to Firebase LZ Gator, south of Chu Lai. O'Brien served a 13-month tour in-country from 1969 to 1970 with Alpha Company, the Fifth Battalion of the 46th Infantry, 198th Infantry Brigade, Americal Division. He was a regular foot soldier, or, as commonly referred to in veterans' slang, a "grunt," serving in such roles as rifleman and radio telephone operator. He was wounded twice while in service and was relatively safe during the final months of his tour when he was assigned to jobs in the rear. O'Brien ultimately rose to the rank of sergeant.
When he returned to the United States, he studied intermittently at Harvard University and worked for the Washington Post (1971–74) as an intern and reporter. He collected his newspaper and magazine articles about his war experiences in his first book, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (1973). By turns meditative and brutally realistic, it was praised for its honest portrayal of a soldier’s emotions.
The Vietnam War is present in many of O’Brien’s novels. One of the two protagonists in Northern Lights (1975) is a wounded war hero. Set in an isolated, snow-covered part of Minnesota during a disastrous cross-country ski trip, the novel is an examination of courage. Going After Cacciato (1978), which won a National Book Award, follows both a soldier who abandons his platoon in Vietnam to try to walk to Paris and a fellow infantryman who escapes the war’s horrors by inventing elaborate fantasies about his journey. In The Things They Carried (1990), a fictional narrator named Tim O’Brien begins his memoir with a description of the items that the members of his platoon took to war, which range from physical objects, such as weapons and love letters, to emotions of terror and homesickness. While a man’s lifelong fear of dying from a nuclear bombing is the subject of The Nuclear Age (1981), In the Lake of the Woods (1994) returns to the subject of the experiences and effects of the Vietnam War.
JOHN STEINBECK was born in Salinas, California, in 1902, in a stately home on Central Avenue (now open as a popular luncheon spot). During his childhood, Salinas had a population of about 5,000, was the county seat of Monterey County, and a trading and shipping center for the lower Salinas Valley. The geography and demographics of the valley, the “Salad Bowl of the Nation,” stamped the young boy’s sensibilities.
A strong sense of place is evident in his fiction: “I think I would like to write the story of this whole valley,” he wrote to a friend in 1933, when he was 31 years old, “of all the little towns and all the farms and the ranches in the wilder hills. I can see how I would like to do it so that it would be the valley of the world.” In 1952 he published his epic novel about the Salinas Valley, East of Eden.
In fact, Steinbeck would grow up to tell stories that many area Salinas Valley ranchers and farmers would rather not be told—embedded in his novels was Salinas gossip; his characters were often lonely, misunderstood farmers and ranchers; and in his books, dreams of ordinary workers are dashed—his books tell of failed dreams of land ownership in California.
The Grapes of Wrath, his signature novel, published in 1939, traces the journey of the Joad family from Oklahoma to California, where they find not the fabled land of their dreams but a place with few jobs, low wages, and inadequate worker housing. Steinbeck’s novel excoriated the greed of the Associated Farmers, business interests in California. That position did not make him a popular figure in his hometown of Salinas.
Today, Steinbeck’s status has risen in Salinas, and the writer who vowed to put his slice of central California on the map of the world—and did so—who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, and who put the city of Salinas on the map of the world - is a favored son.
The National Steinbeck Center, a museum and cultural center in downtown Salinas, pays tribute to his life and lasting impact on American literature and on American identity. The Steinbeck museum explores his ecological vision, his commitment to social engagement, and his many stories about the working class—all of which insure his work is deeply relevant today. Steinbeck’s books have been published in more than 45 languages, and he is, truly, a citizen of Salinas as well as a citizen of the world.
A strong sense of place is evident in his fiction: “I think I would like to write the story of this whole valley,” he wrote to a friend in 1933, when he was 31 years old, “of all the little towns and all the farms and the ranches in the wilder hills. I can see how I would like to do it so that it would be the valley of the world.” In 1952 he published his epic novel about the Salinas Valley, East of Eden.
In fact, Steinbeck would grow up to tell stories that many area Salinas Valley ranchers and farmers would rather not be told—embedded in his novels was Salinas gossip; his characters were often lonely, misunderstood farmers and ranchers; and in his books, dreams of ordinary workers are dashed—his books tell of failed dreams of land ownership in California.
The Grapes of Wrath, his signature novel, published in 1939, traces the journey of the Joad family from Oklahoma to California, where they find not the fabled land of their dreams but a place with few jobs, low wages, and inadequate worker housing. Steinbeck’s novel excoriated the greed of the Associated Farmers, business interests in California. That position did not make him a popular figure in his hometown of Salinas.
Today, Steinbeck’s status has risen in Salinas, and the writer who vowed to put his slice of central California on the map of the world—and did so—who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, and who put the city of Salinas on the map of the world - is a favored son.
The National Steinbeck Center, a museum and cultural center in downtown Salinas, pays tribute to his life and lasting impact on American literature and on American identity. The Steinbeck museum explores his ecological vision, his commitment to social engagement, and his many stories about the working class—all of which insure his work is deeply relevant today. Steinbeck’s books have been published in more than 45 languages, and he is, truly, a citizen of Salinas as well as a citizen of the world.