Meeting the Professor: Growing Up in the William Blackburn Family

Rating:
Summary: A compellingly written and inherently fascinating memoir
Review: Meeting The Professor: Growing Up In The William Blackburn Family is the autobiography of novelist, essayist, editor, and academician Alexander Blackburn (Professor Emeritus of English, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs). Meeting The Professor provides a kind of dual portrait of Alexander and his father William Blackburn (a legendary crative-writing professor at Duke University and mentor to such authors as Reynolds Price, William Styron, Anne Tyler, and Fred Chappell). Born in Iran to mission parents, William Blackburn became a Rhodes scholar at xford and earned a Ph.D. from Yale. He was a brooding, taciturn and ultimately unknowable man who died blind and speecless at age 73, with one of his most beloved students, Reynolds Price, staying at the bedside night after night playing Mozart for him. Alexader Blackburn would follow the literary life, becoming a teacher of writing like his illustrtous father, as well as maturing into a novelist. Meeting The Professor is enhanced with 40 black/white photographs and is a compellingly written and inherently fascinating memoir.