Scott and Charles on vacation in Arizona around 1958.
Spencer with Victoria Wilson, his editor at Knopf. Wilson edited many of his books, including Endless Love, Waking the Dead, and Preservation Hall. The two have remained friends.
An exhausted Spencer holding his newborn daughter, Celeste, at Roosevelt Hospital in New York City in 1979. Celeste is now a painter living in Brooklyn.
Celeste in 1984, standing in front of the Spencer house on the South Side of Chicago. Spencer remembers Celeste as being determinedly artistic throughout her childhood.
Spencer and his son, Asher, in New Orleans, Asher’s mother’s hometown, in 1987. Asher now lives in Brooklyn and is working toward his PhD in economics from CUNY.
Asher on vacation he took with his father to St. Petersburg, Russia, in front of a restored war ship that the Bolsheviks used to fire upon the Winter Palace during the Russian Revolution.
Celeste with her dog, Oliver, in Rhinebeck, New York, taken while she was studying at Bard College.
Charles Spencer, Scott’s father, reading a selection from his second book, Left, Two Three (1986), in a Chicago bookstore, with Scott’s children Celeste and Asher listening on.
Nominees at the PEN/Faulkner Award ceremony in 1995. Among those present are Spencer (front row, second from left), George Plimpton (back row, center), Francine Prose (back row, second from left), and Mary Lee Settle (front row, fourth from right).
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Doubleday & Company, Inc.: Excerpt from “I Am a Book I Neither Wrote nor Read,” copyright © 1959 by Delmore Schwartz from Summer Knowledge, New and Selected Poems, 1938, 1958 by Delmore Schwartz. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Shapiro, Bernstein & Co., Inc.: Excerpt from the song “Cry” by Churchill Kohlman as recorded by Johnnie Ray. Copyright MCMLI. Renewed by Shapiro, Bernstein & Co., Inc. New York, NY 10022. Used by permission.
copyright © 1979 by Scott Spencer
cover design by Joanna Rieke
ISBN: 978-1-4532-0524-2
This edition published in 2010 by Open Road Integrated Media
180 Varick Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
Endless Love Page 44