There was a moving obituary in the NY Times about Louis Simpson, a Pulitzer
Prize-winning poet who told characteristically American tales of common people
and often cast a skeptical eye on the American dream.
Simpson was born in Jamaica of a Russian-Jewish mother and an aristocratic white father who hid is African ancestry. He moved to New York as a teenager and left Columbia College, as so many other young med did, to serve in World War II. His life storyy is tailor made for a spell-binding book.
I had never heard of him. My loss. You can access his obit here.
Written in the early 1960s. his cynical poem “In the Suburbs” seems apt for today.
You were born to waste your life.
You were born to this middleclass life
As others before you
Were born to walk in procession
To the temple, singing.