Description: William MacLeish grew up in an elite world. His father -- Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, journalist, playwright, lawyer, teacher, government official -- was often compared to T. S. Eliot; his mother, Ada, was a beautiful singer who'd given up her career for her family. In this beautifully written work that is part homage, part apologia, and part William's effort to understand the father he never really knew, readers glimpse this heady world of cultured celebrity though the eyes of a young man in its thrall.

Because his parents were so often in New York, William and his sister stayed with their grandfather and governess at a family home in Connecticut. But it is of their time at Uphill Farm, a beautiful old farmhouse in Massachusetts, that MacLeish has his fondest and most telling memories -- and where his parents' lives shaped his own. There, young William played with the likes of Gerald and Sarah Murphy, John and Katey dos Passos, Carl Sandburg, Dean and Alice Acheson, and Felix Frankfurter. And there, he learned to adapt or face banishment -- and in doing so, learned resentment and anger. But he also learned how to please his father and make him proud.

Uphill with Archie attempts to make sense out of Archibald's fame and its effects on those around him during the half-century he and William shared. It is a deeply involving and intoxicating read.

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