The Growing Seasons: An American Boyhood Before the War [Paperback]

Samuel Hynes (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 24, 2004

For Americans who grew up in the 1930s, the phrase "before the war" calls up a distant time as remote from the way we live now as some foreign country. Looking back with a clear-eyed, unsentimental gaze, Samuel Hynes describes his midwestern boyhood during the lean times of the Great Depression: his father’s wandering search for work; a long, hot summer on a farm; rough-and-tumble games in city alleys; the temptations of sex, stealing, and drinking; the wonder of falling in love for the first time. With eloquence and humor Hynes recaptures the dreams, adventures, sins, and triumphs of his American boyhood in the years of hardship and innocence before the war.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Hynes's literary style is best defined by Mr. Mulligan, one of his former writing teachers, who said good writing is "plain as a pine board, clear as well water." This honest, scrupulously organized study of Hynes's Depression-era boyhood has the simple effectiveness of a family photograph. Son of a widower and "sort-of" son of an undemonstrative stepmother, Hynes (Flights of Passage) learned farming and describes chores and his experiences in the outdoors matter-of-factly. He captures the smell of a skunk as "a pungent cloud that soaked me like a sudden shower of rain." Violent details of a teamster's strike don't quite spring to life, but his admiration for gangsters of the era conveys a youngster's awe. The book is particularly touching when Hynes lays out his father's steel-strong work ethic and belief in meeting his obligations while standing on his own feet. There's a piercing sweetness in the portrait of Hynes's first sexual experience, when his guilty girlfriend is told to say hundreds of Hail Marys and never see him again. His assessments of "how it feels to be really drunk" and first seeing a girl "in the perfection of her nakedness" are starkly realistic. Like a stunningly precise diary, Hynes dwells on nothing, nor does he artificially heighten events, not even stories about two local murders. What Hynes achieves with journalistic eloquence is showing a way of life and presenting an affectionate portrait of people who rarely verbalize their feelings but show love in subtle, unexpected ways.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

In this moving memoir, Princeton professor Hynes (lauded for his accounts of his World War II experiences) traces his boyhood from birth until he entered the navy. Born into a staunch midwestern, Scotch-Irish Presbyterian family in 1924, Hynes saw his world abruptly change when his mother died. The Depression hit soon after, and his father found himself scrambling around the country, desperately searching out work with two small boys in tow. Hynes' father soon married an industrious Catholic widow with three children of her own, a relationship that was as much a business arrangement as a romantic proposition. Throughout it all, Hynes sifts through the small details that make up a childhood: the summer spent earning his keep on a Minnesota farm, the intricate games he played with his siblings and neighbors, and the remarkable stories spun by his father and stepmother. Placing his boyhood perspective into a historical context, Hynes revisits the major events of the time. His crisp writing evokes nostalgic memories of a time long past while successfully avoiding sentimentality. Brendan Dowling
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (February 24, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0142003964
• ISBN-13: 978-0142003961
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,899,599 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The father is the star of the show, May 5, 2003

By 

Dave Schwinghammer "Dave Schwinghammer" (Little Falls, Minnesota USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Growing Seasons: An American Boyhood Before the War (Hardcover)

If you're feeling nostalgic for your carefree youth, you may want to give THE GROWING SEASONS a read.
Samuel Hynes takes us to Depression-era Minneapolis, where he covers all the bases of coming of age, but the real star of the book is Sam's father, who struggles through hard times, moving from city to city in search of stable employment, finally finding it as an oil salesman in Minneapolis. He loses that job, too, only to open a City Service gas station, always seeming to bounce back. The man is a rock.
What's memorable about the man is his values. When his first wife dies, he remarries, not so much for love, but to find a mother for his two sons. At Thanksgiving, he asks for the neck from the turkey, claiming he prefers it to a leg or a breast. When his son dents the running board on his new car, he's grateful his boy is all right. He seems to understand that boys have to try things out, to take a risk here and there, even if it's buying a phony driver's license and carousing with his pals at roadside beer joints. There's a scene where Sam's father is on his death bed where finally he asks for a little understanding. Just before he dies, he says, "I gave up a lot."
Sam is also an endearing character. His first sexual experience is as clumsy as most everybody's is. He's not even sure he got the job done. The book ends with Sam leaving for Navy flight school a couple of years into WWII. By that time you've made friends with Sam and you won't want the book to end. But take heart, Hynes has written several other memoirs about his war experence: FLIGHTS OF PASSAGE being the most memorable.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Poignant if a bit acidic, May 13, 2003

By 

Schmerguls "schmerguls" (Sioux City, Ia USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Growing Seasons: An American Boyhood Before the War (Hardcover)

This is a prequel to the author's great war memoir, Flights of Passage, which I read with much appreciation 23 May 2001. If you have not read that book, by all means read this one first, then read it. This book is an account of a not extraordinary boyhood, but it is told in a poignant, if a bit mocking, way. When I finished it, I found myself much impressed by the way he told the story. It maybe helped that Hynes is only a few years older than I am, and that his account of a single summer doing farm work in Minnesota was filled with things I remember from my youth on an Iowa farm. It was another world and a time now irretrievably past, and I think this is an elegantly told growing up story I enjoyed as much as I did Russell Baker's memorable classic (Growing Up, read 11 Apr 1986) and Jimmy Carter's An Hour Before Daylight (read 11 Mar 2001).

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars understated, detailed, reflective memoir on midwest youth, June 2, 2004

By 

Bruce J. Wasser (Lake Bluff, IL) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Growing Seasons: An American Boyhood Before the War (Paperback)

The now storied "Greatest Generation" did not come full-blown into glory. It evolved from childhood, and Samuel Hynes' gentle, understated and illuminating memoir, "The Growing Seasons," assists in our understanding of how the generation that fought and won World War II came to be. Fiercely independent, perpetually inquisitive and unabashedly self-conscious, Samuel Hynes comes of age in America's heartland during the Great Depression. His story, crafted with gentle humor and exquisite detail, gains transcendence and slowly emerges as a representation of millions of youngsters grappling with the age-old obligation of developing an identity, but doing so in an era of frayed innocence and material dispossession.

Loss and impermanence permeate Hynes' childhood. His father stoically accepts the death of his wife, unemployment as a result of a contracting economy and his own inability to serve the nation he so deeply loves. This unspoken patriotism and sense of place nurture the young Hynes, who never overcomes the gaping wound of losing his mother to a premature death. Motherloss uproots the Hynes' family; the father swallows prejudice and remarries a Catholic and Samuel begins the process of healing and carrying on with life.

While his father settles into his second family, Hynes spends a summer on a farm. The city boy discovers new cadences to life, a different pattern to work. Most importantly, Samuel gains a sense of his own past. "For one season I had been one, like my father...and all those other country people in our family." With solemn pride, Hynes announces, "I had been my ancestors." With this knowledge of self, Hynes is better able to comprehend the modernizing influences besetting his altered family in Minneapolis during the 1930s.

There, he observes his father's deep ambivalence over labor violence. A Shell oil salesman, the father is a rock-ribbed Republican who extols the virtue of independence and responsibility. Yet, the father "despised the upper-class ways" of the elite. Samuel watches his father's despair increase. "Whoever won this war, something he believed in would lose. It was sad, losing like that, and I felt his sadness."

Tempering Samuel's growing awareness of the world is his evolving relationship with his step-mother. Hynes respects, admires and even likes her -- her purposeful energy, her zeal for order, her enthusiasm for life and work -- but never loves her. Even his thirteen-year-old autobiography excludes mention of her, and when his father coerces Samuel to include her, Samuel does so with a "chilled heart." Frugal and despeate to keep her family afloat, his step-mother sells a forgotten but cherished model train set. Awash in the economic misery of the Great Depression, where even wanting something unneeded is considered unworthy, the sale reminds the still-growing Samuel of the transitory nature of life, that "anything could be taken."

Yet, "The Growing Seasons" is far from grim. Warmth abounds in the memoir, ranging from an excused absence from school due to a housekeeper's inability to close her mouth to the supreme satisfaction to Hynes' deep satisfaction at being able to finally don long pants to school instead of the dreaded knickers. The evolution to adulthood, the absoption of what it means to be a man, the quiet knowledge of the necessity of standing alone -- these benchmarks of maturation -- bespeak a person truly in touch with his own personality and his own potential.

As Hynes becomes a man, with his attendant alienation from public school and his fascination with sex, he carries with him the formative experiences of childhood. Chafing at his relative youth, longing to experience the formative fires of war, Hynes' restlessness symbolizes an American energy, a robust transformative power that rings true in this instructive and engaging memoir.