"This book will become one of the classics of twentieth-century autobiography."—Gilbert Highet.

"A splendid example of an all-American tale of a kind that defies scholarly research: only a survivor could have written it."—Time.

"A wonderfully entertaining book. In addition, it is a specifically American odyssey ... illuminating about the author and about his formative period ».—Times Literary Supplement.

Autobiographical novel is, above all, a delicious and detailed description of daily life in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century.
The great milestones of that period and the main protagonists of it were an important part of the life of Kenneth Rexroth and in his story he gives us a good account of them: the suffragettes; the abolitionists; the birth and development of the artistic, political and intellectual vanguards on both sides of the Atlantic; bohemia, anarchists, the IWW and wildcat strikes; The orginazed crime; the experience of religiosity; life and work in the mountains; the Chicago and San Francisco Cultural Renaissances; conscientious objection to the Second World War; or the origin of the rebellion of the sixties -to cite some of the most outstanding moments of these memories- are part of a wild, captivating and amazing landscape through which Rexroth parades all the people who shaped those lost worlds and unrepeatable.
Today it is already clear that Kenneth Rexroth was an important man: his literary contribution, his social activity and his way of managing life, thus endorse it. And these memoirs —edited, revised, and expanded by Linda Hamalian, and translated by Carlos Manzano— corroborate it.