1974: A Personal History

by Francine Prose

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

From one of the most respected writers around, this juicy and insightful read is the first time Francine Prose has written so extensively about her own life. Set in the endlessly fascinating 60s and 70s, this is the indelible portrait of an emerging artist at an uncertain time.

“In this remarkable memoir, the qualities that have long distinguished Francine Prose’s fiction and criticism—uncompromising intelligence, a gratifying aversion to sentiment, the citrus bite of irony—give rigor and, finally, an unexpected poignancy to an emotional, artistic, and political coming-of-age tale set in the 1970s—the decade, as she memorably puts it, when American youth realized that the changes that seemed possible in the ’60s weren’t going to happen. A fascinating and ultimately wrenching book.”—Daniel Mendelsohn, author of The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

The first memoir from critically acclaimed, bestselling author Francine Prose, about the close relationship she developed with activist Anthony Russo, one of the men who leaked the Pentagon Papers—and the year when our country changed.

During her twenties, Francine Prose lived in San Francisco, where she began an intense and strange relationship with Tony Russo, who had been indicted and tried for working with Daniel Ellsberg to leak the Pentagon papers. The narrative is framed around the nights she spent with Russo driving manically around San Francisco, listening to his stories—and the disturbing and dramatic end of that relationship in New York.

What happens to them mirrors the events and preoccupations of that historical moment: the Vietnam war, drugs, women's liberation, the Patty Hearst kidnapping. At once heartfelt and ironic, funny and sad, personal and political, 1974 provides an insightful look at how Francine Prose became a writer and artist during a time when the country, too, was shaping its identity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780063314092
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	06/18/2024
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	571,754
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.86(d)

About the Author

Francine Prose is the author of twenty-two works of fiction including the highly acclaimed The Vixen; Mister Monkey; the New York Times bestseller Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932; A Changed Man, which won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize; and Blue Angel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her works of nonfiction include the highly praised Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife, and the New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer, which has become a classic. The recipient of numerous grants and honors, including a Guggenheim and a Fulbright, a Director’s Fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, Prose is a former president of PEN American Center, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College.

Hometown:

New York, New York

Date of Birth:

April 1, 1947

Place of Birth:

Brooklyn, New York

Education:

B.A., Radcliffe College, 1968

Editorial Reviews

★ 04/08/2024

Bestselling novelist Prose (The Vixen) documents a single, pivotal year of her life in her visceral debut memoir. In 1972, Prose fled Cambridge, Mass., her failing marriage, and an in-progress graduate degree for San Francisco, where she lived off and on for the next few years. “I liked feeling free,” she writes, “alive and on edge, even a little bit afraid.” In 1974, as 26-year-old Prose prepared to publish her second novel, The Glorious Ones, she met Tony Russo in San Francisco through mutual friends; three years before, Russo had been indicted alongside Daniel Ellsberg for leaking the Pentagon Papers. Dazzled by Russo’s heroic reputation, Prose spent rainy winter evenings riding shotgun in his Buick, absorbing his monologues about Vietnam, the RAND corporation, and his shadowy enemies in government. She fantasized about taking their relationship, which had become sexual, into more explicitly romantic territory, though friends and tarot readers warned Prose that the affair would “end badly.” After she returned to New York City to promote her book in the summer, that prophecy came true: she reunited with Tony in a disastrous episode that made her complicit in his public disgrace. Prose braids musings on the Patty Hearst kidnapping, Nixon’s resignation, and other historical events into her finely wrought narrative, expertly using them to throw her own coming-of-age into relief against the dawning political cynicism of 1970s America. Deeply felt and devastatingly confessional, this brave personal reckoning isn’t easy to forget. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"Deeply felt and devastatingly confessional, this brave personal reckoning isn’t easy to forget.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A moving tale, from an expert storyteller, about growing up.” — Library Journal (starred review)

“In this remarkable memoir, the qualities that have long distinguished Francine Prose’s fiction and criticism—uncompromising intelligence, a gratifying aversion to sentiment, the citrus bite of irony—give rigor and, finally, an unexpected poignancy to an emotional, artistic, and political coming-of-age tale set in the 1970s—the decade, as she memorably puts it, when American youth realized that the changes that seemed possible in the 60s weren’t going to happen. A fascinating and ultimately wrenching book.” — Daniel Mendelsohn, author of The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

"Francine Prose's 1974: A Personal History is a reverberating account of a time—the point in the early 1970s when the revolutionary energy of the 1960s had been replaced by futility and paranoia—and of a character, Tony Russo, who exemplifies that time. The constraint of history and character gives the book a novelistic intensity and focus, with, as a bonus, a three-dimensional portrait of the author on the threshold of adulthood." — Lucy Sante

"Through the prism of Vertigo, in a spellbinding memoir, Francine Prose resurrects her misbegotten San Francisco romance in 1974 with one of the two men who stole and published the Pentagon Papers, the one who went to prison for it, the one driven mad by the lies of Viet Nam. A hypnotic portrait of a lost time when people lived and died for the truth." — John Guare, playwright, Six Degrees of Separation and A Free Man of Color

"A stunningly alive portrait of the artist as a young woman, set during that dizzying time when the hopeful love-fest of the '60s morphed into the murky violence of the '70s. Reporting from both coasts, Prose laser-focuses on her relationship with indicted Tony Russo who had helped leak the Pentagon papers, the outrageous Patty Hearst kidnapping, drugs, sex, and the omnipotent Vietnam war. A fascinating travelogue of the tremendous changes in both a country and a personality struggling to find their best selves. Heartbreaking, haunting and indelible." — Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of Pictures of You and Days of Wonder

"Award-winning Prose writes her first memoir, setting it in the ’70s and detailing her relationship with activist Anthony Russo, of the Pentagon Papers fame. She was in her 20s, driving around San Francisco at night, hearing his theories and stories, and forming herself as an artist—and coming of age in a radically changing world." — Library Journal

“Francine Prose’s sublime, haunting memoir shows us the Seventies in all its dizzying contradictions—the darkness and paranoia, the open roads and strange new connections. A world where some voices disintegrated, never to cohere again—while others - emerged, brilliant and searing, out of the calamity. Poignant, mesmerizing, profound—1974 offers revelations not just about the Seventies but about our world today.” — Danzy Senna, author of Caucasia and New People 

“…deeply personal…revealing….Joyful and sad nostalgia offered up in spades.” — Kirkus Reviews

"In this wonderfully clear-sighted memoir Francine Prose catches a moment when idealism shifted and the world turned. 1974 is also a story about youth, risk and survival - a story women don't tell often enough, perhaps. Wise, achieved, entirely satisfying." — Anne Enright, author of The Wren, the Wren

From the Publisher

★ 05/01/2024

In 1974, Prose's (Mister Monkey) first novel had just come out, but her marriage and hopes of an academic career had shattered. Nothing felt certain: the Vietnam War, Prose's own self-doubts, and more. So she traveled cross-country to San Francisco where she roomed for a while with a couple of free spirits, who introduced her to their friend Tony Russo. He was an activist and Daniel Ellsberg's accomplice in the release to the press of the Pentagon Papers. Tony was 36, and she was 26. For a few months, they were a pair. But exposure and prison had driven him into permanent, paranoid radicalism. When Prose's second novel was published, she went back East, and he followed. But by then, he had become unable to distinguish between reality and fantasy. After a few painful meetings, Prose left Russo and never saw or talked to him again. In this memoir, 50 years later, she thinks of who she was then and is now and discusses failing someone who needed a friend. VERDICT A moving tale, from an expert storyteller, about growing up.—David Keymer

Library Journal