"I guess it’s fair to say that there were two distinct phases to my life in West Virginia," writes Homer H. Hickam, Jr., in Rocket Boys: A Memoir. "Everything that happened before October 5, 1957 and everything that happened afterward." As it happens, Mr. Hickam’s pivotal moment was shared by millions across the globe; the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik 1 marked the dawn of the Space Age and sent spasms of disbelief and national self-doubt rippling across the United States. The author’s father flatly dismissed the prospect of Russian technology sailing over Coalwood, West Virginia. "President Eisenhower would never allow such a thing," declared the senior Hickam.

The satellite cast a long shadow over the mining town where Homer and Elsie Hickam were raising Homer Jr. and older brother Jim — mostly in the form of a challenge to American youth to redouble its efforts in mathematics and the sciences. The darkness and tension of the Cold War lent an almost supernatural quality to the feats of rocketry and spaceflight. Four decades later, Hickam remembers, "They [the Soviets] were so walled off to us . . . when you don’t know someone and they’re a mystery to you, you tend sometimes to ascribe superhuman qualities to them."

That fall, the Hickams were getting almost all of their news from Life and Newsweek. The magazines arrived on Wednesdays — and persuaded all that the "Red Moon" was a reality. The author had just turned 14 and liked "Pepsi and Moon Pies." He also really liked biology classmate Dorothy Plunk.

A love of reading — particularly science fiction — and some success at writing short stories distinguished the boy, but those qualities were largely lost on a father obsessed with his responsibilities as Coalwood’s mine superintendent. The fact that "Sonny" seemed ill-suited for a life in and around mining created a painful gulf between the father and his namesake.

As Sputnik augured an era that would pass the mines by, it also inspired the youngest Hickam to begin experimenting with rocket propellants and designs according to models seen in Life. He banded together a group of close friends and formed the Big Creek Missile Agency. As time passed, they would become known, in town and throughout the county, simply as the "rocket boys."

After early mishaps (including the launch of his mother’s rose-garden fence), the rockets began to soar. With better propellants and more sophisticated designs, the Auk series (named after a bird that cannot fly) began reaching heights of a mile and beyond. Auk XXXI, the final flight, would reach an altitude of more than six miles. Its design was the product of painstaking empiricism coupled with hard-won skills in chemistry, calculus, and engineering. For their work, the miners’ sons had won the Gold and Silver medal at the National Science Fair. Then, in the spring of 1960, hundreds gathered at "Cape Coalwood" for the final launch. Among them, for the first and only time, was Homer Sr. He flipped the switch to fire the rocket, and in one shining moment the door was closed on the tensions and confusion which had surrounded the two. Sonny Hickam had finally been given permission to be something other than a mine engineer.

There was another fine moment in that spring of 1960. Junior Senator John Kennedy from Massachusetts came through the county en route to the Democratic nomination. Sonny made it his business to let the candidate know that the United States should go to the moon. Kennedy seemed to take the idea more seriously than the well-wishers gathered that day. It’s an astonishing image, and Hickam plays it beautifully, deadpanning, "well, I really think that Wernher von Braun had more to do with it than I did, but . . . "

Next came four years at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. After graduating in 1964, his rockets took him not to Cape Canaveral and NASA’s triumphs, but to the dark side of the 1960s: service in Vietnam. "I volunteered to go over there. I felt I should go, and I had an ulterior motive: I wanted the experience. I was young and invulnerable, and the war was something I wanted to taste — a crucible to pass through. Once there, it took me about 48 hours to figure out ‘I don’t really want to die over here.’ I didn’t see much that was worth my life or the lives of my men . . ." Hickam finished his tour with a Bronze Star and the Army Commendation Medal and remained with the service as an engineer until 1981.

More than two decades after Sputnik, Hickam was living his boyhood dream. At NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, he began training astronauts for orbit. He worked on many Space Shuttle missions, including the delicate rescue of the Hubble Space Telescope, before leaving the agency earlier this year. The time has been spent establishing an aerospace consultancy and concentrating further on his writing.

"I don’t look for inspiration. If I did, I’d probably never sit down in front of the word processor. The first thing to do is to go ahead and write and not worry too much about the style and format or anything like that. Get the story down and then go back — what I really love is to go back and re-write. I’ve made the mistake of faxing stuff when it was hot off the typewriter, and I’ve always regretted that. Every time."

Well, perhaps not every time. Rocket Boys the book began in 1994 when Hickam received a desperate call from an editor at Smithsonian Air and Space. A few hours and 2,000 words later, Hickam had submitted what amounted to the germ of a book. The hitch: he had to track down 14-year-old Sonny Hickam, his compatriots, supporters — and his father. The intervening years had pulled survivors away as it banished them to the edges of his memory. "Finding the boy’s voice was the real challenge," he says. "It was only when I started writing the book that it really came back to me — how I felt in those days before that last launch at Cape Coalwood . . . I’d have to say that in the intervening years I did not have any issues with Dad, and I don’t think he had any with me. I was quite contented about our relationship. In trying to find the boy’s voice, I had to bring the issue back up and worry it over."

With Rocket Boys in print and a Universal Studios film due shortly, Life magazine has again been arriving at his house — this time for photo shoots.

Meanwhile, as NASA struggles to regain the momentum of its early years, Homer Hickam is "disappointed, but not surprised" by the agency’s focus on Earth orbit at the expense of the moon. "When I spoke to Kennedy, I thought we should go, and I still think we should go." The author has given himself a productive way to "worry it over." Next up: a "techno-thriller" called Back to the Moon.

Christopher Lawrence is a freelance writer based in New York City.

"This wasn’t what I meant to write at all," Bobbie Ann Mason says of her new memoir, Clear Springs. She laughs. "But that’s often true of a work. Usually I don’t know where I’m going at all. I’m just following something."

What Mason followed this time was an urge to recreate her own upbringing and the history of her family, especially her relationship with her mother over several decades. In five sections ranging back and forth from the 1940s into the 1990s, Clear Springs beautifully paints a loving and perceptive portrait of a family’s personalities and fortunes. "I think the questions I was asking are universal questions," Mason says. "The book starts out with the chapter at the pond, and reflecting on a moment of self-awareness, looking at where I’ve been and what I’ve connected to. It’s a way of asking who you are."

About five years ago Mason wrote what is now chapter one as a separate essay. "I didn’t realize I had a book for another year or so. In this case I did have a few years’ worth of interest in family history that got me going. There were all those early chapters about childhood and school and church. I kind of put them in different piles and tried to see what kind of sense I could make out of them. I had to find a way of sorting them all out so that they would cohere so that there would be patterns of them."

Clear Springs is Mason’s first book of autobiographical nonfiction, but it seems an inevitable step. Most of her fiction deals with the area she knows best, rural and suburban Kentucky, where she now lives again after decades in the North. Mason found the experience of writing a memoir fascinating. "I think it’s a natural impulse to want to find some kind of coherence and meaning in your life, to find that it has a narrative, and that there are patterns. There are themes in your life, and themes that connect back to previous generations. You can see where you fit into the puzzle." The image of fitting together puzzle pieces occurs repeatedly in Clear Springs. "Your life starts to make sense, in terms of what you’ve done before and what you’re doing now."

The prose in the new book is slower, more leisurely and meditative, than that of Mason’s fiction. "The characters I write about usually are in the middle of the whirlpool," Mason admits. "They’re racing down the highway. The confusion that the characters in the stories are in — it’s a culture shock. It’s rural people meeting the modern age and getting thrown out."

 One parallel between the fiction and the nonfiction is that Mason thinks of all the real people in Clear Springs as characters. "I think right at the heart of the book, for all the characters," she speculates, "is culture shock. It all happens at World War Two and thereafter. Before that, everything was pretty much the same. For all three generations that I’m writing about, the culture shock is happening almost simultaneously."

Mason has been chronicling this kind of shock for some time. Since her 1982 debut story collection, Shiloh and Other Stories, she has gone on to three novels — In Country, Spence + Lila, and Feather Crowns — and the excellent recent collection Midnight Madness. She is also writing the volume on Elvis Presley for the new Penguin Lives series of short biographies. One of the many pleasures in Clear Springs is Mason’s inclusion of snippets of the first stories she wrote, youthful imitations of the girls’ detective stories she so loved, which later resulted in her charming (and recently reissued) book The Girl Sleuths.

Considering her scholarly interests, evident in her book on Nabokov’s nature imagery, Mason’s style is surprisingly straightforward, never tricksy, seldom particularly allusive. But like Nabokov in his own autobiography, she approaches facts with the tools of an artist: "It’s awfully hard working with facts — or even what you remember as facts. I had so much trouble writing this book because I had to be faithful to what I knew to be fact, and yet I was trying to write something that in many ways was like fiction. But I couldn’t just haul off and make up things."

Like most memoirs, Clear Springs returns again and again to the question of the accuracy and potency of memories. "I realized that your memories over time are really lost, or they’re transformed," Mason says. "They become memories of memories, and you lose sight of the original. And finally there are a lot of things you remember that you can’t prove really happened, and there are a lot of things you don’t remember that did happen."

Out of her memories Mason brings to life the finely graded social distinctions which would be invisible to outsiders, but which anchor and define the members of a group, like the hierarchies in the world of Proust or Tolstoy. For example, Mason’s father treated her mother like a country girl, and his family made her feel inferior because she married slightly above her station.

To the question of what’s next for Bobbie Ann Mason, she gives some thought and responds slowly. "I think I want to turn a corner and go in a different direction. I don’t know what that will be. Well, I want to write short stories. I don’t know what they’ll be like, but I think they’ll be different."

Clear Springs ends in October of 1996, with a masterful chapter in which Mason herself does not appear. With all of her novelist’s talents she recreates an event her mother described to her, in which the elderly woman falls into a pond while trying to catch a fish. It’s a simple scene, barely an anecdote, that Mason somehow leaves resonating with significance and passion — and, quietly, implicitly, with her profound love for her mother.

There’s a fine moment in Clear Springs when Mason and her young husband begin their first garden. It nicely sums up her tone and symbolism in this book: "When I plunged my hands into the black New England soil, I felt I was touching a rich nourishment that I hadn’t had since I was a small child. It had been years since I helped Mama in the garden. Yet the feel of dirt seemed so familiar. This was real. It was true. I wheeled around and faced home."

Michael Sims is the author of Darwin’s Orchestra (Henry Holt).

Playwright Neil Simon's first autobiographical work, Rewrites [1996], ended with the death of his first wife Joan after 20 years of marriage. Simon recently talked to BookPage about his latest book, The Play Goes On, which continues to the present.

BookPage: Why split your life into two volumes?

Neil Simon: I really couldn't go on past Joan's death because I didn't want to trivialize it. And The Play Goes On has turned out to be a fuller, richer book on its own. Also, the first book was my first attempt at writing full-length prose. This time I knew more about the editing process, how it all works. It was easier.

BP: Easier technically or emotionally?

NS: Both. Once you've opened yourself up, it's best to go all the way. The first book was a love story about falling in love with the theater and with Joan. The second goes quite a few steps farther in talking about the price you pay for writing all those plays, for putting yourself on the line all the time before an audience.

BP: Were you surprised by which memories were the most painful, or the most pleasurable?

NS: It's always painful when you're writing memoirs because you've got to go through the dark places, but it gives you a chance to find out the person you really are, not the person you thought you were. The most pleasure came from remembering the start of a relationship that you thought would last forever or the starting of a play, and caring for that play about as much as you care for a newborn baby in the family. Then there's the disappointment when the play or the marriage doesn't work.

BP: It seems that Joan, your second wife Marsha Mason, and other family members often inspire your plays.

NS: I've just finished my 31st play, and actually only five have been based on my marriages, like Barefoot in the Park with Joan, and maybe five on my family. The rest have come out of my mind, my own creation.

BP: Tolstoy said a writer meets all of his characters before he's 12 years old.

NS: If I'm allowed to disagree with Tolstoy . . .

BP: He just stepped out.

NS: Fine. I'll ignore him. A lot of your personality is formed before you're 12, obviously, but only a few of my plays, like Broadway Bound and Brighton Beach Memoirs, use characters from my childhood. The more mature plays are affected only by my adult experiences.

BP: What do you mean in The Play Goes On by saying you've waited all your life to write Lost in Yonkers?

NS: It is probably the most honest play I've ever written. I did the best and dug the deepest I ever did. I was making up the story, but I tried to capture the characters as I do in my semi-autobiographical plays. I spared nobody in that play.

BP: You seem to be writing all the time.

NS: I work a regular five days a week like anybody else and take vacations. I work consistently, no matter what. I admit, when I took a four-week vacation to Europe with my family this year I got up every morning at 6:00 to work on fixing The Dinner Party, a new play set to open in Los Angeles in December. I won't give away the story, but it deals with six characters at a posh dinner. It's a dissection of their marriages and divorces.

BP: Relationships are your basic theme. And your characters, who are often very specifically from New York backgrounds, play well on stages in many different countries.

NS: The Odd Couple has the universal theme of the difficulty of two people living together. Others also do well, in Europe especially, but what surprised me is that The Sunshine Boys—and I'm only going by the royalty checks—plays everywhere in the world. I thought those two aging comedians were specifically New York.

BP: Your plays often translate well from stage to movies and TV, too.

NS: Not always, and I never write a play with an eye to film. And I don't like losing the words, as you have to, when I'm asked to turn a play into a movie. It's not a matter of ego . . . I'm just better able to create the character for an audience through words rather than through actions. I much prefer writing an original movie with the screen in mind to transferring a play to the screen.

BP: You mention Chekhov as an influence.

NS: I go to see plays all the time, and whenever I see Chekhov, I'm amazed at how this Russian play strikes home to me living 100 years later in New York City. I'm drawn to him because of his way with characters and their relationships with each other.

BP: You tell many backstage stories in The Play Goes On, but you really don't talk about individual performances.

NS: I don't want to restrict the life of a play to a particular production. The original actors might leave after the first six months, and I want the play to last 30 or 40 years. You write for the character, not the actor on the stage, unlike films, where they might ask you to write a part to fit Mel Gibson or Julia Roberts even if the producer hasn't hired them! You never do that in a play.

BP: Is the germ of a new play for you a character, or the story, or the theme?

NS: All at once. I start with the characters but try to find almost simultaneously what situation they're in, what links them together. After about 25 or 30 pages, you think there's not enough stationery in the world to put down the whole story. That's the best feeling possible . . . It's still a mystery to me, how the plays come page by page, where they come from. Writers feel like a middleman, standing with pen in hand over the page. A force greater than me stands above telling me what to write. That may sound romantic, but that's how it feels.

BP: "Pen in hand"?

NS: You get attached to the way you write, and I'm attached to notebooks. That's where I really write the plays. Just two or three pages at a time, then I transfer to the typewriter and rewrite while I type . . . That's the first rewrite! I don't use computers . . . I'm someone who needs to see the page right away in my hand.

BP: Does the writing get harder?

NS: Getting plays produced is harder, but I think if you have a truly good play it's not going to disappear, even with the tougher economics of Broadway and the competition of musicals and hits from Britain.

BP: The marriage and divorce themes of the play you're revising, The Dinner Party, dovetail with the conclusion of The Play Goes On, after your third divorce.

NS: I'm a marrying man. I've never left a marriage. If Joan hadn't died, we'd still be married today. But just as human beings can be born with genetic faults, I think some marriages have a genetic flaw that can cause them to die.

BP: At age 70 you still believe in marriage, in general and for yourself?

NS: I don't like dating or just living with a woman. I like to create a relationship, a marriage. And almost all of my marriages have involved children, so I'm really a family man as well. I'm going with someone now . . . She, I hope, will be the last marriage.

BP: A new play. A new marriage. The play goes on.

NS: Yes.

Charles Flowers, a freelance writer in Purdys, New York, recently received the Stephen Crane Literary Award.

It's a relief, really. Mary Gordon seems no more inclined to answer deeply personal questions than I am to ask them.

Of course, the questions flutter at the periphery of our conversation about her collection of meditative, autobiographical essays, Seeing Through Places: Reflections on Geography and Identity. How can I not wonder about the pain of a child who dreams of fairy princesses and kisses the knee of "Grandpa" Haubrecht in hopes of forming some sentimental connection with the old man, only to recognize in his unbending silence that she is not the magical child of her imagination, and probably not even a child at all? Or the desperation of a 15-year-old living alone with her alcoholic mother in increasing dishevelment, who hears a bird trapped in her closet struggling toward death and reacts by pulling her clothes from the closet, laying them on a chair, and never opening the closet again until it is time to go to college?

But, really, what more could I actually learn by asking Gordon about her implacable grandmother or her cruel aunt? Her mother and the priests who "embodied her idea of the desirable male"? Or the fact that her father, who died when she was seven, was the only person she liked to play with?

In these eight linked essays about the places that have shaped her sensibility—as in her recent memoir about her father, The Shadow Man, and her novels Final Payments and The Company of Women—Gordon writes with such brilliant specificity and with such sensitivity to the fine gradations of human emotion that readers simply infer the answers to such questions. To actually ask them is a betrayal of one of the deepest pleasures of reading writers as good as Gordon: that sense of one mind and spirit connecting with another's. To ask also invites a kind of reductive pop psychologizing. Or worse, the commodification of spirit, which is a sorry hallmark of our era, and an increasing concern for Gordon.

"What makes me nervous," she says midway through our conversation, "is that even people's interest in religion has become a commodity. I mean, the corporate world is now getting spiritual advisors so that their executives can be more productive, because they need to be in touch with their spiritual roots in order that they can make a better Web page . . . There's no other narrative, except commodity and profit. I find myself wondering, is there anything that is not commodifiable?"

Religion has never been a commodity for Gordon. She was raised in a family that "took deep pleasure in the liturgical world of the church" and assembled at her grandmother's on Tuesday nights to watch Bishop Sheen on television. But in the 1960s, in a moment described in the essay "The Architecture of a Life with Priests," a young priest's well-meaning remark "demolished the walls of the confessional," and led her to realize that she "would have to leave the church, because to live with this new sense of lightness and clarity I would need a dwelling that let in the light."

Thirty-some years later, Gordon has returned to the church. "Those sacred spaces were very formative, and irreplaceable," she says. "I began to understand that the habit of mind that was generated by those sacred spaces was very important to who I am, and that if I didn't honor my hunger for that, I would be less than truthful about who I really am. This is another reason why the metaphor of place is so important to me. I needed to be in the psychic space that only church ritual and the ethical framework that is expressed in ritual could give me. Nothing else would substitute for that."

But sacred spaces are not the only places Gordon reflects on in Seeing Through Places. There are also the houses of her grandmother and her babysitter and the neighbors next door, the public places of New York, and a forsaken house on the Cape. Seeing Through Places developed "without an intentional arc," Gordon says. At some point she realized that the essays she was writing were about place and that she wanted to "talk about where I am, I mean literally where I am and metaphorically where I am. So I organized the book around the motif of a journey." That journey spans only a short distance in miles—from Valley Stream, Long Island to Manhattan—but it is an immense psychic journey from a seemingly cloistered life in a working class neighborhood to public life as a best-selling novelist and English professor at Barnard.

"I really wanted to meditate on a place being at the center of a consciousness," Gordon says. "The accidents of place, the pressure of place that enables certain kinds of behaviors and makes other behaviors impossible. So that place becomes an agent in ways that are practical, in ways that can be tyrannical, and in ways that are very atmospheric and hard to pin down. . . . Often when people write about place it's from a sensibility that believes that place is divorced from people and has a kind of life of its own. I was brought up to think that people were more important than place and more important than things. I was even brought up in a sensibility that said that the invisible is more important than the visible. So the way that I come at place is not the way that Protestant males come at place. If this were an equation, I would be talking about place minus Thoreau."

In the most poignant essay in the book, "Places to Play," Gordon writes that as a child, she was not good at playing and always felt that she "was only masquerading as a child." Desperate to be taken seriously, she couldn't wait for childhood to end. Gordon later writes that she graduated from college younger than when she entered, and credits Barnard and the 1960s for teaching her the value of play.

"Far from being a '60s basher," she says, "I am so grateful for them. Because we were all allowed to play and to be serious. . . . The playful and the serious were able to flow in and out of one another in a way that for me was extremely freeing. And at Barnard, my mind was given play. I was given tremendous attention, a debt I can never repay."

Little wonder, then, that she has returned to Barnard to teach and that she writes of the place in her final essay with such affection. "I'm always afraid that with one false move, which I can't predict or name, I could be back at that old place I was in when I was young," Gordon says near the end of our conversation. "But I also feel a tremendous sense of gratitude and amazement that life has had so much more pleasure and amplitude and graciousness than I ever believed it would have when I was a child."

Alden Mudge is a reviewer in Oakland, California.

Anyone who’s observed Jimmy Buffett’s music career and heard his song lyrics knows that his main product is carefree optimism. But Jimmy has a little secret: he’s been a workaholic for 30 years. As we learn in his memoir, A Pirate Looks at Fifty, he works just as hard at having good times as he does earning them.

The book is a travelogue with flashbacks — and not the kind you might fear. Insightful and entertaining, this detailed instruction on how to live a rewarding life might well be deemed the ultimate self-help manual.

We spoke to Mr. Buffett recently, just after he’d spent several days in New Orleans, "revisiting his youth."

Tom Corcoran: In A Pirate Looks at Fifty you say that you squeeze 36 hours into every day. How did you find time to create a 400-page book?
Jimmy Buffett: I had a deadline! I’d started a novel before I got involved in the musical production of Herman Wouk’s Don’t Stop the Carnival. That was fun, but a creative sidetrack. I still owed the publisher a book. I pulled out my old journals and took a lesson from David Niven, who wrote a wonderful non-tell-all biography called The Moon Is a Balloon. It was informative, yet entertaining to the point of near-fiction in which he’d made himself a character. I decided to write about a journey during which I reflected on events in my life. A lot of it was already on paper. Plus, that deadline . . .

TC: How much of your wanderlust can we attribute to your reading?
JB: Almost all of it, from my youth up till today. I hate to mention age, but I come from an era when we weren’t consumed by technology and television. My mother insisted that her children read. To describe my scarce leisure time in today’s terms, I always default to reading. It didn’t hurt that I came from a Gulf Coast storytelling tradition. I went to the Caribbean because my grandfather sang calypso songs. Simple as that.

TC: You state in this book that you’ve tried to follow your instincts and keep your sense of humor. Creativity aside, how much of your success can you attribute to instinct and humor?
JB: Ninety percent of it. Instinct taught me 20 years ago to pace a song or a concert performance. That translates into pacing a story, pleasing a reading audience. I don’t know where I got it. It must be instinct. Humor has bailed me out of more tight situations than I can think of. If you go with your instincts and keep your humor, creativity follows. With luck, success comes, too.

TC: A Pirate Looks at Fifty demonstrates your fascination with many people, not necessarily for what they do, but how well they do it. Do you judge yourself the same way?
JB: I remember the excruciating school task of writing a three-page term paper. But, oh, that feeling when I was done! I think I drive myself for that feeling of accomplishment. Herman Wouk told me, "Write a page a day. It will add up." So I make sure to do it. Whether it’s a letter, song lyrics, part of a novel, or instructions on how to fix a kitchen sink, it’s writing. You keep your craft honed, you acquire the discipline to finish things. You turn into a self-taskmaster.

TC: Twenty years ago you were sailing the Caribbean. For the past decade you’ve been flying all kinds of aircraft, all over the hemisphere. How do you foresee your introduction to "A Pirate Looks at Sixty"?
JB: I’m inspired by people who keep on rolling, no matter their age. I’ve talked recently with Harry Belafonte and with Mose Allison, two musicians who continue to enjoy performing and life. Quitting doesn’t enter my mind. I want to keep going as I have, to travel, read, perform, write, and enjoy my family. I’ve promised myself only this: no more Laundromats, no more two-shows-a-night, and no more deadlines. I’ll work at my own pace.

Five or six years ago, Da Chen got badly bitten by the writing bug. He had finished Columbia Law School and moved on to the Wall Street firm of Rothschild, Inc. Then he started reading John Grisham and, like any number of other dreamy, ambitious young law students, he thought he would try his hand at writing a legal thriller. "I got 200 pages into it and realized I didn't have a Bruce Willis character," Da Chen says with a rueful laugh. He gave it up.

The problem was, the writing bug wouldn't let go. Perhaps Da Chen moped a bit. Perhaps he stared a little too longingly at the blank yellow legal pads he hoped to fill with character and action. At some point his wife, a physician, suggested that he write about his childhood.

Da Chen grew up in the tiny Chinese village of Yellow Stone in the 1960s and 1970s, during the tumult of the Cultural Revolution. He sometimes told his American-born wife wild tales from his childhood—about dogs eating snakes, and men eating dogs. "It was humorous to make her feel disgusted," Da Chen recalls. "She was fascinated—and sort of disturbed—by the stories I told. My childhood was so very different from hers. She met me after I graduated from law school. I came to her as a suit, nothing else, and a suit hides a person. The present is always a disguise for the past." There were stories he had not told his wife, stories he could barely tell himself.

His wife continued to urge him to write about his childhood, if not for the readers of the world, then at least for his own children. He tried, but it was difficult to know where to begin. His great grandfather had passed a very difficult civil service test and eventually became the regional governor and a large landholder. Should he begin with him? Or with his grandfather, who quartered Red Army troops during the Communist Revolution, thereby escaping the fate of his wife's wealthy brothers, who were all executed? Or with his father, a disgraced landlord, who was hauled into labor camps with each shift of the political winds in faraway Beijing? Or with his remarkable grandmother? Or his equally remarkable mother?

"Least of all with me, right?" Da Chen says. "A first person story is very rare in Chinese literature. China is such a country of tradition, it is very hard to put yourself at the center. I struggled with that a lot at the beginning."

Eventually he found a path and a structure, and the pages of the book that would become Colors of the Mountain began to pour out of him. Then something happened. He came to describe a moment in the third grade when his teacher, one of the ignorant, vicious, petty tyrants set loose upon the land by the Cultural Revolution, stripped him of his identity, began calling him "the guy in the corner," and made Da Chen, son of a landlord, open game for every sort of cruelty.

"I would lock myself in our little spare bedroom," Da Chen recalls, "and I would write and I would cry. I can't believe how much anger I had. I buried this huge depression and sadness until the moment I began to write the book. I rarely told people about this experience because I always felt that I must have done something wrong to cause it. Now, after writing Colors of the Mountain, I feel, wow, it was not me. The whole society was dysfunctional at the time."

It is almost impossible for the Western reader to understand just how dysfunctional Chinese society was. We tend to see the Cultural Revolution as a distant abstraction, in broad political and sociological terms. In Colors of the Mountain, Da Chen presents the impact of the Cultural Revolution on a small village, far from China's political epicenter, as seen through the eyes of an exceptionally bright, sensitive, and artistic boy.

"I didn't want to go into too much detail about the political background," Chen says. "I just want people to imagine and to understand that this is what happened to me. The book is more from the heart than the mind. I was only nine years old. I didn't know what made sense and what didn't make sense. All I knew was what I had to go through."

Naturally not everything he went through was a hardship. Chen describes warm friendships with a rough bunch of boys he fell in with when the other children in the village rejected and tormented him. He describes the sanctuary of love and warmth he found at home with his parents and siblings. He describes a beautiful, "sparsely populated, very pastoral" region where "you could go and write great poems—if you weren't forced to plow the fields." He also vividly describes the extraordinary change that came over the country when Mao died in 1976.

"It was a very strange feeling," Chen says. "Here was this guy I was supposed to hate forever, which I do. But Mao was the heaven; Mao was the earth—and everything in between. That's how big he was. When he died it was like a whole dynasty had died, and I felt that China might die with him."

But instead of dying, China was swept by a passion for education. Even the remote village of Yellow Stone was carried along by college fever. Caught up in the national mood and shouldering the aspirations of his family, Da Chen proved to be a disciplined and brilliant student, scoring so high on his exams that he was admitted to the prestigious Beijing Language Institute. Colors of the Mountains ends with Da Chen boarding a train, the first train he had ever ridden, for the 50-hour trip to Beijing.

"In the United States, people everywhere go to college. It's expected. But for me, nothing in my life can ever compare to the moment I left Yellow Stone to go to college. It was like being liberated from a dungeon. For much of my life I felt like a frog trapped at the bottom of the well, looking up at beautiful passing swans. A quick glimpse and they were gone. Suddenly I felt that the swans I so admired had dropped into my well."

Da Chen thinks that even though Colors of the Mountain is set in China and is about a Chinese boy, "it is really about every boy and every girl. Everybody has gone through something like this." I doubt that his American readers will agree. Colors of the Mountain is about an extraordinary journey that, thankfully, most of us will never need to endure.

But Da Chen is exactly right when he says Colors of the Mountain "is about hopes and dreams. It's about hope even when you are hopeless. It's about making dreams come true."

Alden Mudge works for the California Council for the Humanities in San Francisco.