Report from the Interior

"In the beginning, everything was alive," begins this memoir from Paul Auster. "The smallest objects were endowed with beating hearts." Having recalled his life through the story of his physical self in Winter Journal, Auster here remembers the experience of his development from within, through the encounters of his interior self with the outer world. From his baby's-eye view of the man in the moon to his childhood worship of movie cowboy Buster Crabbe, the composition of his first poem at age nine, and his dawning awareness of the injustices of American life, Auster charts his moral, political, and intellectual journey as he inches his way toward adulthood through the postwar 1950s and into the turbulent 1960s.