HUNTERDON STREET,
1939 - A Newark Memoir
by Martin Bucco
About the Author
Martin Bucco is Professor Emeritus of English at
Colorado State University, where he taught American literature from
1963 to 2005. He was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1929 and attended
public schools in Essex County. In 1948, he was graduated from Belleville
High School, where he was senior class president and played varsity
football. He attended Newark Rutgers for a year, but ventured to
New Mexico, where he earned his B. A. from Highlands University
in 1952. He returned East and received his M. A. from Columbia University
in 1957, and he worked as an English instructor at the University
of Missouri, where he received his Ph. D. in 1963. The author of
many scholarly books, journal articles, and literary reviews, Martin
Bucco has received numerous honors and awards for his teaching and
scholarship. He lives with his wife in Colorado, where they spend
much of their time conversing, reading, and commenting on the birds
in their backyard:
About the Memoir
This memoir of Martin Bucco's life as an imaginative
nine-year-old boy living temporarily next door to his grandparents'
Italian-American grocery store on Hunterdon Street in the Clinton
Hill Section of Newark in 1939 not only captures scenes from a vanished
but vividly remembered past, but is an implied but durable bridge
between the author's childhood and adolescence, between nearly a
decade of his earlier Sunday visits to Hunterdon Street from north
Newark and nearly a decade of his later Sunday visits to Hunterdon
Street from suburban Belleville. If the memoirist's mature perspective
plainly refrains from making sophisticated commentary on his 1939
Self, he makes his boyhood's limited language and angle of vision
in Newark as unequivocal as possible. "This neighborly small
fry," says the seventy-eight-year-old author, "has been
popping in and out of my life for longer than I can forget."
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