The Boomer's Guide to Story

A tour of modern literature, looking for insights, ideas, and wisdom. Roughly 500 short essays take a look at around 300 modern-day stories, pointing out insights of every kind--into humanity and life. Fiction has always considered every subject, and so do the essays in this book.

Fundamentally a book of ideas, "The Boomer's Guide to Story" consists of roughly five hundred short essays that study and analyze around three hundred modern-day stories. A rich source of timeless concepts, universal insights, and ultimate truths, the book has as its natural market the eighty million baby boomers in the United States. Yet the collection of considered novels, screenplays, plays, ballads and more that dates from circa 1930 should appeal to readers of all ages. A substantial guide that can be "dipped into," due to its unique approach to each example, it highlights a variety of important works from "Citizen Kane," "To Kill a Mockingbird," "Taxi Driver," to "The Sting." Literature in all its forms is a treasure-trove of insight and wisdom, and this book uncovers a great deal of it. Dramatic, illuminating, and peppered with humor, it exposes the profound, intriguing, and observant qualities of a story that often go unnoticed. With compliments to many highly gifted writers and storytellers, it should revive a great many cherished and wonderful memories. To art, to art! To the great storyteller's art.

Trained in history at Princeton University and in finance at the Wharton Graduate School, Roemer McPhee has always had literature as his first passion. Like many of the other tens of millions of baby boomers in the United States, he has spent a good part of his life reading. As far as literary art is concerned, he might (must) be called a passionate layman. He also likes to call himself a "wisdom junkie," borrowing a current, popular phrase. "The Boomer's Guide to Story" was assembled with much memory work, and much research. Roemer McPhee lives in New York City with his wife and son.