Pack My Bag: A Self-Portrait

Henry Green

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In 1938 Henry Green, then thirty-three, dreaded the coming war and decided to "put down what comes to mind before one is killed." Pack My Bag was published in England in 1940. When he wrote it, Green had already published three of his nine novels and his style"a gathering web of insinuations"was fully developed.

Pack My Bag is a marvelously quirky, clear-eyed memoir: a mother who shot at mangle wurzels (turnips) bowled across the lawn for her by the servants; the stately home packed with wounded World War I soldiers; the miseries of Eton, oddities of Oxford, and work in the family factory--the making of a brilliantly original novelist. "We have inherited the greatest orchestra, the English language, to conduct," Green once wrote. "The means are there; things are going on in life all the time around us." His use of language and his account of things that went on in his life inform this delightful and idiosyncratic autobiography, which begins: "I was born a mouthbreather with a silver spoon."

Book Details

Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publish Date: Apr 17th, 2004
Pages: 256
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 7.88in - 5.30in - 0.63in - 0.53lb
EAN: 9780811215725
Categories: • Personal Memoirs• Historical• Literary Figures

About the Author

Green, Henry: - Henry Green (1905-1973) was the pen name of Henry Vincent Yorke. He was educated at Eton and Oxford and went on to become the managing director of his family's engineering business, writing nine novels in his spare time. Anthony Burgess found his books "as solid and glittering as gems." He also wrote an astonishing memoir, Pack My Bag, published by New Directions.

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What people are saying

Faine Greenwood

@faineg

2 years

researches: civilian drones, mapping, humanitarian tech, privacy. find me on BlueSky and at @faineg@mstdn.social.

I thank @HelenJMacdonald a lot for their mention of Henry Green's "Pack My Bag" in their own book - I read it back in 2016, and Green's massive fear as a 30-something of what he could see bearing down on him with WWII has been a great comfort to me in the years since. He got it!

'Darker With the Lights On' is a book of my stories and it is available from @transitbooks.

enough apart Henry Green, from ‘Pack My Bag: A Self-Portrait’ https://t.co/m4KPhx45rx

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Praise for this book

"To read Green is to be profoundly challenged and empowered, drawn into a community of feeling, speech, and thought. It's like dancing with Nijinsky or Astaire who leads you faultlessly on."