Chasing Shadows: Memoirs of a Sixties Survivor [Hardcover]

Fred A. Wilcox (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1996

CHASING SHADOWS tells the story of a young man who pays a heavy price for pursuing his own dream. When he announces that he intends to be a poet instead of a doctor, his working class family thinks he's gone crazy. They send him to psychiatrists who shoot electricity though his brain, warn him that he'll never hold a job, and confide that he will suffer from nervous breakdowns all his life. After a stint in a state mental hospital, he spends the 'sixties on the mean streets of New York City, not as a fair weather hippie with a room of his own in Scarsdale whenever he tires of the hard life, but as a fugitive from everyone, and everything, he once loved.

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

A casualty of the conformist 1950s, Wilcox landed in a mental hospital after he rebelled against the mores of his home and community. Upon his release, he moved to New York's Lower East Side, an area about to transform itself into a mecca for the Beat and hippie movements. Here, Wilcox began his personal season in hell as he battled hunger, homelessness, alcoholism, and drug pushers while attempting to pursue his dream of becoming a poet. His grim odyssey unfolds against the historical realities of the 1960s?the Civil Rights movement, the Kennedy assassination, and the Vietnam War. Although Wilcox escaped the pitfalls of the Bowery and Tomkins Square Park, the trauma that drove him there remains everpresent in this painful memoir. Recommended for readers interested in exploring the darker side of the Beat generation.?William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 197 pages
• Publisher: Permanent Pr Pub Co; 1 edition (October 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1877946753
• ISBN-13: 978-1877946752
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #554,032 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars No book, fiction or non, has had a greater impact on my life, October 27, 1998

By 

Alex Karas (nyc) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Chasing Shadows: Memoirs of a Sixties Survivor (Hardcover)

At just under 200 pages, Wilcox's memoir should be praised for it's ability to evoke such extreme levels of emotion from the reader. He makes us laugh, cry, love, and hate, and does so in a way that few authors can. His smooth yet unpredictable storytelling is eclipsed only by the situations themselves. Wilcox effortlessly carries the reader through the merciless streets of New York City in his quest for salvation and identity in the turbulent sixties. His memoir is an enormous literary achievement- and his survival is nothing short of triumphant.

4.0 out of 5 stars Chasing Shadows, December 14, 2007

By 

James B. Hoyt "ballet lover" (Tacoma, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Chasing Shadows: Memoirs of a Sixties Survivor (Hardcover)

This book covers the early era of the Lower East Side in the 60's in New York. Grim, but true. Only book I've found covering this start to the history of LES. This book is just like it was - I was there and know.

3 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A new genre, September 25, 1996

By A Customer

This review is from: Chasing Shadows: Memoirs of a Sixties Survivor (Hardcover)

I partially read this book when I was trying to eradicate all the formating errors so that I could print out all 500 odd pages.
I think I did this twice.
Fred has created a new genre, the 'semi-fictional auto-biography'. In other words, he tells his story with modifications that make it difficult to know where the truth ends and the lies begin.
I guess that is the story of his life, so in that sense it is truthful.
Don't waste your money on this one.
Tony Donohoe