Death of a Rebel: The Charlie Fenton Story
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.64 (862 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 1611474930 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 198 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2017-05-06 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
This is his 18th book.. Scott Donaldson is one of the nation's leading biographers
Biography exacts a staggering cost in time and energy: extensive and expensive travel; toil in archival excavation; potentially fraught interviews with sources, some of them reluctant or hostile or even duplicitous.His objective in Death of a Rebel is, frankly, personal. In the end, while Charlie Fenton’s life was extraordinary in many respects, Donaldson’s book makes clear that we definitively assess and simplify any life at our peril. That this conclusion, whatever it may be, will be securely based on reliable evidence clearly and objectively presented, is the greatest tribute one can pay to this fine biography. West III, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English, Pennsylvania S
Deborah F. Shepherd said This is a sleeper. Would make a great film.. This biography reads like a novel. It takes you up over Germany flying endless missions in WWII, on leave and then AWOL in London, and coming home to the world of writing (his own fiction as well as about the young Hemingway) and teaching at prestigious American universities (Yale and Duke). Our hero finds romance on both sides of the Atlantic. He changes young lives as a dashing and dynamic new professor. He also questions campus life before integration, the old boy network and the limited roles for w. "A surprising story beautifully told" according to Chris Bram. Before this book, I knew of Charlie Fenton as just a footnote in Hemingway studies. But this is an amazing story and Donaldson tells it beautifully.Fenton was an academic who served in the air force in World War II. The chapter about his time as a tail gunner in bombers over Germany is absolutely harrowing, using both military history and Fenton's unpublished fiction to put us inside the man's skin. No wonder he went AWOL at one point.But Donaldson succeeds in making scholarly life vivid too. His accou. A heartfelt biography C Brooks Scott Donaldson's Death of a Rebel is a compelling American tragedy - the rise, and literally the fall of Charlie Fenton, a brilliant academic. If modern western tragedy is the tragedy of `what might have been' and ancient Greek tragedy (life governed by inexorable fate), the tragedy of what `had to be', then Charlie Fenton's life was an amalgam of both. His death was such a great loss. Throughout his life he dropped hints all along the way of how unhappy and troubled he was. Neither he himself, nor hi
In writing it, Donaldson had the assistance of family members, of his devoted students, and even – at a painful distance – of the woman he fellin love with fifty years ago. But it was a dangerous stance that did not sit well with his superiors, and it cost him when his fortunes took a turn for the worse in the spring and summer of 1960.Love and war had a lot to do with his suicide as well. The scandal left him alone and a social pariah around campus. Charlie Fenton, who had come down to Duke from Yale two years earlier with a promotion to full professor, fell in love with one of his graduate students. He had earned Guggenheimand ACLS grants. He was widely regarded as the most popular professor at Duke.Charlie Fenton’s story is a compelling one, and takes on further meaning in the context of the times. At the time he was apparently at the peak of his career. Death of a Rebel tells the story of Charles Andrews Fenton (1919-1960), a charismaticteacher, scholar, and writer who took his own life by jumping from the top of the Washington Duke Hotel in Durham, North Carolina. The book recounts Fenton’s last days in vivid detail. This time he was overcome by psychological pain deriving from loss: of wife and family, of public admiration, of companionshi