Love and Fury ─ A Memoir

An acclaimed author reflects on his upbringing in a post–World War II blue-collar family and comes to terms with the racism, sexism, and other toxic values he inherited.

Love & Fury tells a story that comprises five generations of an American family, examining the continuing impact of history as it shapes the lives of people struggling with the complexities of contemporary life. From the author’s grandfather, a “breaker boy” sent down into the anthracite mines of Pennsylvania at the age of ten, to his young grandson, whose father is among the estimated one million young black men incarcerated today, Love & Fury offers an examination of the social, familial, and ethical contours of American life. With honesty and compassion, Hoffman grapples with the values he inherited in his boomer-generation boyhood from a father whose ideas about masculinity, race, class, violence, women, and religion were a product of his time.

At the book’s core are the author’s questions about boyhood, fatherhood, and grandfatherhood, and about what it means to be a good man in our modern society. A masterful memoirist, Hoffman writes not only to tell a gripping story but also to understand, through his family, the America in which we live.

Richard Hoffman is author of Half the House: A Memoir; the poetry collections Without Paradise, Emblem, and Gold Star Road, winner of both the 2006 Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the 2008 Sheila Motton Award from the New England Poetry Club; and the short story collection Interference and Other Stories. He is senior writer-in-residence at Emerson College and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.