1974. A Personal History

An Evening with Francine Prose

The Cornwall Library will host an evening with Francine Prose, author of 1974, A Personal History, a memoir about her youth in the 1970s and coming of age in counterculture America, Saturday, September 21st, at 4 PM.

She will appear in an in-person conversation with author Roxana Robinson. Participants must register to attend and is required.

Book copies will be available for sale and signing.

In 1974 Prose, describes a close but troubled interlude with a man who helped leak the secret Pentagon Papers in 1971. She was then a young woman in San Francisco, an aspiring writer and Joni Mitchell fan with strong emotions and political convictions.

Prose was a 26-year-old divorcee, having dropped out of graduate school at Harvard and fled to the West Coast where she met economist and engineer Tony Russo, a hero to many for his Pentagon Papers role and his jail time for refusing to testify about it.

The papers proved, in Prose’s words, “...what the antiwar movement had never been able to prove. Our presence in Vietnam was unwanted. We’d committed war crimes.”

Prose saw Russo as a counterculture and free-speech hero and as “antiwar royalty.” But the ensuing relationship between them, which was never quite an affair, proved difficult.

Prose is an award-winning American novelist, short story writer, essayist and critic, the author of twenty novels and much nonfiction. She is a visiting professor at Bard College, a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and formerly president of PEN American Center.

Roxana Robinson, who will introduce and be in conversation with Prose, has written seven novels, three collections of short stories and the definitive biography of Georgia O’Keeffe.