Tag: my back pages

My Back Pages: Perfume in The Preppy Handbook

Looking back, I still don’t completely understand my teenage obsession with The Official Preppy Handbook.  I purchased a copy of this novelty bestseller (published in 1980) from a remainder bin in some bookstore, and I read and re-read sections of it until many bits were committed to memory.

I was (and am) not a “prep,” either in background or in personal style, but I was fascinated by this volume. And, looking back, I’m noticing a perfume reference that probably stayed lodged in my subconscious with all the other commentaries on colleges, clothing, and country clubs.

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My Back Pages: Edith Wharton’s “Summer”

I’ve been re-reading Edith Wharton’s Summer over the past few days, and I can’t stop thinking about it. Wharton’s writing in Summer is clear and elegant, as always, but the subject matter is surprisingly frank and dark for 1917. The story takes place in a desolate small town in rural Massachusetts, where a young woman’s romance with a more worldly man plays out (to a heart-rending conclusion) against the background of a summertime Berkshires landscape.

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My Back Pages: Dorothy Parker and “The Lovely Leave”

Dorothy Parker is known as a humorist, and a black-humorist at that; but a few of her short stories are surprisingly touching. I’ve read “The Lovely Leave” (1943) many, many times, and I still enjoy its vignette of a soldier’s wife preparing for her husband’s all-too-brief leave in wartime New York.

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My Back Pages: Louisa May Alcott’s Eight Cousins

As I think back on books that piqued my early interest in fragrance, I can include quite a few examples of “young adult” literature. Like many girls, I was an avid reader of Louisa May Alcott’s work during my pre-teen years—Little Women, of course, but also lesser-known novels like An Old-Fashioned Girl and Eight Cousins.

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My Back Pages: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “May Day”

In 1920, F. Scott Fitzgerald published a short story titled “May Day” in the literary magazine Smart Set. He had only recently become a sensation for his first novel This Side of Paradise, and he hadn’t even written The Great Gatsby yet, but he was already recognized as one of the voices of the inter-war “Jazz Age” generation.

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