When Robert Howard is assigned James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in his Catholic high school, his teacher, a Jesuit priest, announces, "Other people may read about it, but you are LIVING it!" As promised, the young Howard, growing up in 1970s Detroit, feels an intense identification with the protagonist of Joyce's first novel, Stephen Dedalus. Separated by an ocean and almost a century, they nonetheless share troubled family lives, and a tormented relationship with both faith and sexual desire. After re-reading Portrait in middle age, Howard looks at his two very different responses to the novel, and what he noticed and didn't notice when he was young. "Found Wanting" is part literary memoir, part reappraisal of a literary classic, and part skeptical look at the idea of art as a pathway to personal transformation.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Howard is a veteran writer whose work spans the spectrum from journalism to business writing to literary criticism. "Found Wanting" is his first foray in creative nonfiction.
Mr. Howard is the author and editor of three books. His reviews and essays have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, the Boston Review, and PsyArts, an online journal for the psychological study of the arts founded by Norman Holland.
Born in Detroit, Michigan. Mr. Howard is a summa cum laude graduate of Amherst College and did graduate work in history and sociology at the University of Cambridge and at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, France.
He has won awards for his writing from Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) and the United Steelworkers Press Association. He has also been a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an affiliate scholar at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute.
Mr. Howard lives in Newton Centre, Massachusetts. To learn more about his work, visit his personal website, www.roberthoward.com.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Howard is a veteran writer whose work spans the spectrum from journalism to business writing to literary criticism. "Found Wanting" is his first foray in creative nonfiction.
Mr. Howard is the author and editor of three books. His reviews and essays have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, the Boston Review, and PsyArts, an online journal for the psychological study of the arts founded by Norman Holland.
Born in Detroit, Michigan. Mr. Howard is a summa cum laude graduate of Amherst College and did graduate work in history and sociology at the University of Cambridge and at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, France.
He has won awards for his writing from Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) and the United Steelworkers Press Association. He has also been a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an affiliate scholar at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute.
Mr. Howard lives in Newton Centre, Massachusetts. To learn more about his work, visit his personal website, www.roberthoward.com.
