Living to Prowl [Hardcover]

SAM PICKERING is a professor of English at the University of Connecticut. He has written eight other essay collections, including A Continuing Education and The Right Distance (Georgia). He lives in Storrs, Connecticut.

Reading Pickering is like taking a walk with your oldest, wittiest friend, said Smithsonian magazine. Living to Prowl, Sam Pickering's ninth collection of essays, finds the acclaimed author walking familiar paths, taking time to enjoy family, friends, nature, and other simple pleasures.

Like Pickering's earlier books, this collection records in highly personal and idiosyncratic terms a year in the life of a man with a tenacious commitment to pausing and wondering. Moving easily between humor and seriousness, the mundane and the philosophical, stark truth and evocative fictions, his essays saunter through life and rummage through lives. As Pickering himself puts it, Living to Prowl is meant to make people "turn away from the 'razzleum-dazzleum' of dream and abstraction to see the rich greens and blues at their doorsteps."

The art of the essay as delivered by Mr. Pickering is the art of the front porch ramble.

Pickering takes up the stance of the congenial amateur, familiar with a great many things but expert in none, frank about the world's convictions, enemy to pomposity, a representative man who enjoys without apology the pleasures of household and flesh.

Pickering has all of Thurber's humor, and he writes as well as E. B. White. He writes with passion, wit, and a strange personal note of self-mockery; he is humanely educated, wise, and capable of a wide range of stylistic effects.

Pickering is one of the finest essayists of our time. He is at the height of his powers, and this book is one of his best.