First Loves: A Memoir

First loves tells of a life driven by the twin lusts of romantic love and writing. A legendary editor and literary critic, Ted Solotaroff takes the reader over the rocky course of his education and rebellion in the '50s and through an early marriage that commutes between heaven and hell. Like Truth Comes in Blows, his widely acclaimed previous memoir, First Loves speaks to the simple, profound question: What's your story? Solotaroff's response is naked and nuanced, a startling Bildungsroman. Solotaroff begins with the first sighting of Lynn, emerging from the ocean as if from his heart. Though all too real, she continues to tantalize and torment him in the years that follow. The young couple make their way through Ann Arbor, Greenwich Village, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago, seeking a radical/bohemian haven in the '50s -- the age of "the fat gods," as Saul Bellow put it -- and finding madness, struggle, and unexpected fulfillment in myriad forms. Solotaroff encounters the Henry Wallace movement, the Ezra Pound controversy, McCarthyism, and the transformation of the University of Chicago, and participates in the emergence of the American-Jewish writers. His portraits of Bernard Malamud, Leslie Fiedler, Norman Maclean, Philip Roth, and Norman Podhoretz are, like everything in these pages, alive with the directness and clarity of genuine insight. First Loves is a feat of private honesty from a public intellectual in the making.