Blood and Memory

ROBERT BENSON, a native of New Orleans, was educated at Vanderbilt University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and taught at the University of Southern Mississippi, Southeastern Louisiana University, the University of Dallas, and the University of Georgia before moving to Sewanee, Tennessee, where he teaches medieval English literature at the University of the South. He has published work on Chaucer, Andrew Lytle, John Donald Wade, Cormac McCarthy, J. F. Powers, and others, and he is a regular contributor to the periodical press, particularly to The Sewanee Review.

In Blood and Memory the story of the son annotates the story of the father. That is an old theme, in the literature of the South and elsewhere. Robert Benson handles it without sparing, pitying, or psycho-mythologically aggrandizing himself. The substance of his book is anecdotal; the tone is low-keyed and even-keeled. His contemplation of his own life unexpectedly brought into my mind a writer he apparently knows well enough to have utterly metabolized: Geoffrey Chaucer. - Franklin Burroughs ""Blood and Memory cuts a long deep furrow through time and place. Robert Benson ploughs the rich black topsoil of family and digs into the clay beneath, turning up accounts of days sometimes hard but always well-lived. Snakes wind through the margins of Benson's pages; a swamp spreads like an erasure; and a fishing pole dangles, its hook baited with sweet alluring words. Through signatures of essays, years wander like a stream, sometimes eddying into deep pools, other times crashing and breaking, tossing father and friends onto a dry bank before racing forward. This fine, celebratory book will make recollection flourish."" - Sam Pickering ""In Blood and Memory, Robert Benson charts a Southern boy's adventurous growing up. Out of experience and stories overheard, questions arise; but in revisiting lost time, he discovers understanding. In Benson's vision memory is redemptive, both revealing and confirming life's deeper meanings."" - Elizabeth Spencer