The Virgin of Bennington, Kathleen Norris
The Virgin of Bennington, Kathleen Norris
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The Virgin of Bennington

Author: Kathleen Norris

Narrator: Sandra Burr

Unabridged: 7 hr 56 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download (DRM Protected)

Published: 05/16/2017

Synopsis

The book her devoted readers have been waiting for. At last, New York Times betselling author Kathleen Norris's first continuous narrative . . .a story of sex, drugs, and poetry. After spending her high school years in Hawaii, Kathleen Norris was woefully unprepared for Bennington College in the 1960s, with its culture of drugs, sex, and bohemianism. But it was also at Bennington that she discovered her great love of poetry, which carried her to New York City at a time when a new generation of poets was emerging and shaking up the establishment. Working at the Academy of American Poets for her beloved mentor, Elizabeth Kray, and hanging out at clubs with Andy Warhol's crowd at night, Norris found herself immersed in an exciting and emotionally turbulent new world. Her memoir of that time - of her friendships and encounters with poets, including Jim Carroll, Denise Levertov, Gerard Malanga, Erica Jong, James Merrill, Stanley Kunitz, and James Wright - is an inspiring tribute to poetry and a stunning evocation of time and place. Her tenuous balancing act on the bridge between naïve experimentation and indirection and the more focused responsibilities of adulthood, makes for a dramatic and illuminating account of coming-of-age at a tumultuous moment in our history. "Through three bestselling books published over the past six years, Kathleen Norris has captured [readers'] hearts and fed their souls." - Common Boundary

About Kathleen Norris

Kathleen Norris is the award-winning, bestselling author of Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, Acedia & Me, The Cloister Walk, and Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, in various anthologies, and in her own three volumes of poetry. She divides her time between South Dakota and Hawaii.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Jan on January 20, 2013

Poet Kathleen Norris's coming-of-age memoir of 1970s literary New York is rather flatly written and clogged with name-dropping of literati and Warhol-era glitterati. It's also obtusely self-congratulatory. While she seems proud of her virginity during her early years at Bennington, she sleeps her wa......more

Goodreads review by Keith on July 11, 2008

After I read this book, I wrote to Kathleen immediately. I mentioned something like "I think its the best book you've written." Dakota, I said, was Kathleen trying be a writer. Cloister Walk was a writer trying to be a writer. Amazing Grace was a writer trying to be Katheleen. The Virgin of Benningt......more

Goodreads review by Jason on September 01, 2020

Norris's "memoir" is, more than anything else, more of a document honoring the efforts of her mentor, Betty Kray. It's very much an anti-memoir, in a lot of ways, and I found it so unhurried and unessential that it made me realize it was very much its own thing. I like this one a lot.......more

Goodreads review by Peggy on December 18, 2020

This memoir starts out to be the story of Kathleen Norris and her years at Bennington College and in New York City. Soon it is taken over by Betty Kray, her boss, mentor, and friend. Kray was the executive director of the Academy of American Poets, and hired Norris as an assistant while she was stil......more

Goodreads review by Margaret R on May 08, 2015

The title to this book is clearly misleading. It is really a biography for Elizabeth Kray who was a mentor for Kathleen Norris. Betty started many of the efforts to make poetry and poets more well known in the US. Kathleen worked for her for a few years and Betty supported her efforts to become a go......more

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