Novelist, critic, essayist, screenwriter, teacher, traveler, and art aficionado, Nicholas Delbanco has compiled a mosaic of his life as he glances backwards and forwards from the vantage point of his eightieth year. In episodic riffs, Still Life at Eighty revisits seven houses where Delbanco welcomed a panoply of literati, such as Mary Ruefle, Mary Lee Settle, Mary Robison, John Ashbery, John Cheever, John Irving, and John Updike. Each abode becomes a receptacle of memory, as he recalls his friendships with the likes of James Baldwin, Grace Paley, Frederick Busch, Donald Barthelme, and Russell Banks. The memoir is saturated with artistic appreciation, which colors Delbanco’s life from early childhood to his eightieth year. The grandson of collectors (whose paintings were plundered by the Nazis), nephew of a London gallerist, son of an accomplished painter, and a collector himself, Delbanco summons his reminiscences of art, artifacts, and artists as he pivots from a youthful artistic apprenticeship to become a prolific professional writer.
Still Life at Eighty
Nicholas Delbanco is the author of more than thirty works of fiction and non-fiction. At the University of Michigan –from which he retired as the Robert Frost Distinguished University Professor in English—he was Director of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program and, for twenty-five years, the Hopwood Awards. As the founding Director of the Bennington Summer Writing Workshops, he created the low-residency MFA program. Delbanco is a recipient of the J.S. Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and twice awarded the National Endowment for the Arts Grant in Prose Fiction. He has served as Chair of the Fiction Panel for the National Book Awards, and as a judge for the Pulitzer Prize. With his wife, Elena, he divides his time between Manhattan and Cape Cod.
"Delbanco’s fluency, the self-reflexivity, the allusiveness and elusiveness, the wit are in service here to what feels like something new. -- The Delbanco book I’ve been waiting and wanting to read for half my life. Bravo."
—David Shields, author of Reality Hunger, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead"Still Life at Eighty is a triumphant, wise, and elegant memoir that beautifully explores the experience of aging, the joy of life, the inevitability of its end, and Delbanco's remarkably influential journey through the arts."
-- Charles Johnson, A National Book Award winner and MacArthur Fellow"Houses, family, books, fellow writers, mentors, protégés, ghosts – the wide-eyed younger self meets the wise man looking back with gratitude …. A life worth reading: Nicholas Delbanco does it again."
—James Carroll, author of The Cloister"Nowadays the word “memoir” can conjure up gruesome tales of abuse, crime, and poverty. Happily, Nicholas Delbanco’s backward look at age 80 is a welcome rarity: this richly gifted author has been blessed with a fortunate life…. Delbanco’s birthday is time for a reckoning … Scores of houses ("repositories of memory"); rollicking friendships with the major writers of his time; a family troupe of loving women."
–Lynn Sharon Schwartz, author of 29 books of fiction, essays and poetry including the celebrated novels, Disturbances in the Field and Leaving Brooklyn.
