Son of two American Gurneyite ministers (one disgraced) moves to Europe, learns lapidary writing

A charmingly unaffected and diverting set of reminiscences, with personal recollections of Walt Whitman, William James, and Benjamin Jowett. Logan Pearsall Smith wrote the first drafts of chapters in the 1920s while on a private Mediterranean cruise with Edith Wharton, then worked them up into a volume in the 1930s, while in his early seventies. The book is entertaining and hard to put down. ( )

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