Pickering, Samuel F(rancis), Jr. 1941-

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PICKERING, Samuel F(rancis), Jr. 1941-

PERSONAL: Born September 30, 1941, in Nashville, TN; married, wife's name Vicki; children: three. Education: Sewanee, The University of the South, B.A., 1963; Cambridge University, B.A., 1965, M.A., 1970; Princeton University, Ph.D. (English), 1970.

ADDRESSES: Home—Storrs, CT. Office—Department of English, Box U-4025, University of Connecticut, 215 Glenbrook Road, Storrs, CT 06269-4025. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Montgomery Bell Academy, Nashville, TN, instructor, 1965-66; Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, assistant professor, 1970-78; University of Western Australia, Crawley, research associate, 1993-94; University of Connecticut, Storrs, professor, 1978—; author and book reviewer.

AWARDS, HONORS: National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, 1974; American Council of Learned Societies grant, 1976.

WRITINGS:

ESSAY COLLECTIONS

A Continuing Education, University Press of New England (Hanover, NH), 1985.

The Right Distance, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 1987.

May Days, University of Iowa Press (Iowa City, IA), 1988.

Still Life, University Press of New England (Hanover, NH), 1990.

Let It Ride, University of Missouri Press (Columbia, MO), 1991.

Trespassing, University Press of New England (Hanover, NH), 1994.

Walkabout Year: Twelve Months in Australia, University of Missouri Press (Columbia, MO), 1995.

Living to Prowl, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 1997.

The Blue Caterpillar and Other Essays, University Press of Florida (Gainesville, FL), 1997.

Deprived of Unhappiness, Ohio University Press (Athens, OH), 1998.

A Little Fling and Other Essays, University of Tennessee Press (Knoxville, TN), 1999.

The Last Book, University of Tennessee Press (Knoxville, TN), 2001.

OTHER

The Moral Tradition in English Fiction, 1785-1850, University Press of New England (Hanover, NH), 1976.

John Locke and Children's Books in Eighteenth-Century England, University of Tennessee Press (Knoxville, TN), 1981.

Moral Instruction and Fiction for Children, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 1993.

Also coeditor of Children's Literature, 8 volumes, Yale University Press, 1979-81. Contributor to numerous magazines and journals.

SIDELIGHTS: Samuel F. Pickering is a professor at the University of Connecticut and the author of eleven essay collections. He has also authored numerous scholarly works, book reviews, and over two hundred journal and magazine articles. He is "a much sought after speaker," noted Janie Franz for Critique, popular in the lecture circuit "mostly for his wit and his writing expertise, but sometimes for his inadvertent connection with Hollywood." Franz is referring to the fact that while teaching at Montgomery Bell Academy, a boys' prep school in Tennessee, Pickering so influenced one of his students, Tom Schulman, that when Schulman grew up, he wrote a screenplay based on Pickering. The name of the movie is Dead Poets' Society, and the character that actor Robin Williams plays in this movie, although fictionalized, was brought to life by Schulman's memories of Pickering.

Pickering is known best, outside of his classroom, as the creator of such imaginary characters as Slubey Carts, Proverbs Goforth, Googoo, and Loppie, all of whom live in the fictionalized city of Carthage, Tennessee. These characters tend to pop up in the middle of Pickering's essays about common things in life like grading papers, raising children, or listening to conversations at a local cafe. In a review of The Last Book, a Publishers Weekly writer said, "Pickering has the natural essayist's intimate yet distanced take on the world."

Many of the essays in Pickering's first collection, A Continuing Education, are about Pickering's experience as a teacher. The collection marks Pickering as a man who can laugh at himself and at other people who take themselves too seriously. He is also noted as a writer who focuses on the small details in life. As quoted in a review for Booklist, Pickering stated that the little things "are about all most people have." George Core in Sewanee Review quoted Pickering as saying, "I told curious friends in the university that I wrote the essay as an exercise in gilding the mundane."

In The Right Distance, Pickering reminisces about his Tennessee boyhood. "His Tennessee background provides a steady supply of amusing stories," wrote a reviewer for Kirkus Reviews. One of the more amusing tales involves Pickering, as a young boy, rushing through a meal, only later to discover that he had eaten his pet rooster. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly, like many other critics, praised Pickering's writing in this collection for its "informal but flawlessly crafted prose."

Many of the essays contained in May Days were inspired by a trip Pickering took with his wife, Vicki, and their children to Nova Scotia, Canada, where Vicki's grandparents once ran a farm. While visiting the now nonfunctioning farmland, Pickering went up to the attic and browsed through old trunks filled with scrapbooks, letters, and diaries. He then reconstructed the life of Margaret Fuller Jones, Pickering's wife's grandmother, creating images that he hoped his young daughter would appreciate one day. A reviewer for Kirkus Reviews referred to the essays in this collection as "refreshing little gems."

Pickering wrote Still Life at about the same time that reporters began to hound him, wanting to know how it felt to have part of his life retold in Dead Poets' Society. When people asked about his life, he supposedly told them they should read his current book for answers. Barbara Scotto, in the Wilson Library Bulletin, wrote that in the essays in Still Life Pickering's "sense of voice is so compelling that it seems he has allowed the reader to enter his thoughts, to wander there with him." In this collection, Pickering reflects on his sudden notoriety, as well as his role in the community as he becomes a member of the school board, and his emotions as he responds to the death of his mother. Library Journal reviewer Martin J. Hudacs noted that Pickering's essays are "revealing and entertaining pieces of literature."

In 1995 Pickering took a sabbatical from teaching and traveled with his wife and children to Australia. He published his account of that experience in Walkabout Year: Twelve Months in Australia. Some of the essays in this collection reflect on his children's adjustment—or lack of it—to Australian schools. Most of the essays, however, refer to Pickering's own fascination with the flora and fauna of the Outback. George M. Jenks wrote in Library Journal that the essays contain "nuggets of wisdom . . . and glimpses of the thoughts of a middle-aged man in a foreign . . . world." Alice Joyce, writing for Booklist, said the collection is "distinguished by its warmly rendered, entertaining observations that leave a satisfying afterglow."

Pickering is well known for mixing fact with fiction in order to emphasize some of the familiar Southern culture in which he grew up. It is in Living to Prowl that his slight leaning toward fiction comes most alive, as he walks down the streets of his imaginary version of the city of Carthage. In a review for AB Bookman's Weekly, a reviewer wrote, "Pickering's imaginary Tennesseans are unusual in American literature: they are fictional characters existing outside the novel or short story form." There is a real city of Carthage, to which Pickering also refers, recounting stories about his family. Pickering also often jumps from the fictional town of Carthage in the midst of a conversation between his made-up characters to the conversations of real people, forcing readers to let go of a rational string of thought. The reviewer from AB Bookman's Weekly commented that Pickering's "essays have an elliptical structure that allows him to mix detailed observations of daily life . . . together with evocations of fictional lives and readings. . . . He knows just how far to follow a meandering line, just when to come back."

Several elements tie all of Pickering's essay collections together: his sense of humor, his focus on the ordinary, and his meandering from one topic to another more serious one with a few completely made-up characters thrown in at odd moments. "Pickering's essays," wrote a Publishers Weekly writer in a review of The Blue Caterpillar and Other Essays, "are like balls in a pinball machine, rolling from target to target with no apparent logic." As Jeff Gundy observed in Georgia Review, Pickering's writing "is charming, funny, incessantly inventive, and always entertaining." Although his musings center on similar, ordinary themes, Gundy said, "when Pickering gets done with the ordinary, there's nothing ordinary about it." As a reviewer for Kirkus Reviews wrote in a review of A Little Fling and Other Essays, Pickering "knows just how to coax from the ordinary the kind of sustained nourishment that imbues life with significance."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

AB Bookman's Weekly, May 18, 1998, review of Living to Prowl, pp. 1359-1360.

Best Sellers, February, 1986, Riaz Hussain, review of A Continuing Education, pp. 427-428.

Bloomsbury Review, May, 1997, review of The BlueCaterpillar and Other Essays, p. 22.

Booklist, October 15, 1985, review of A ContinuingEducation, p. 294; January 1, 1988, review of The Right Distance, p. 731; May 15, 1994, Roland Wulbert, review of Trespassing, p. 1646; November 15, 1995, Alice Joyce, review of Walkabout Year, p. 531.

Choice, April, 1977, review of The Moral Tradition inEnglish Fiction 1785-1850, p. 202; February, 1982, review of John Locke and Children's Books in Eighteenth-Century England, p. 767.

Georgia Review, fall, 2000, Jeff Gundy, review of ALittle Fling and Other Essays, pp. 567-569.

Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 1987, review of The RightDistance, p. 979; May 1, 1988, review of May Days, p. 680; March 15, 1994, review of Trespassing, p. 62; July 15, 1998, review of Deprived of Unhappiness, p. 1022; August 1, 1999, review of A Little Fling and Other Essays, p. 1206.

Library Journal, June 15, 1990, Martin J. Hudacs, review of Still Life, p. 117; May 1, 1994, Judy Minken, review of Trespassing, p. 104; November 1, 1995, George M. Jenks, review of Walkabout Year, p. 97; March 15, 1997, Janice Braun, review of The Blue Caterpillar and Other Essays, p. 64.

Modern Language Review, April, 1979, K. J. Fielding, review of The Moral Tradition in English Fiction 1785-1850, pp. 421-422.

New York Times Book Review, August 3, 1997, N. Graham Newsmith, review of The Blue Caterpillar and Other Essays, p. 17.

Publishers Weekly, July 31, 1987, review of The RightDistance, p. 64; April 18, 1994, review of Trespassing, p. 54; October 16, 1995, review of Walkabout Year, p. 55; February 10, 1997, review of The Blue Caterpillar and Other Essays, p. 79; August 3, 1998, review of Deprived of Unhappiness, p. 69; July 23, 2001, review of The Last Book, p. 66.

Sewanee Review, October, 1985, George Core, review of A Continuing Education, p. R92; October, 1988, Pat C. Hoy II, review of May Days, p. 688, and The Right Distance, pp. 692-693; July, 1992, Martin Lebowitz, review of Let It Ride, p. R60.

Southern Humanities Review, winter, 1984, review of John Locke and Children's Books in Eighteenth-Century England, pp. 77-78.

Times Literary Supplement, June 24, 1977, A. O. J. Cockshut, review of The Moral Tradition in English Fiction 1785-1850, p. 756; May 7, 1982, Pat Rogers, review of John Locke and Children's Books in Eighteenth-Century England, p. 500.

Virginia Quarterly Review, spring, 1982, review of John Locke and Children's Books in Eighteenth-Century England, p. 56; summer, 1988, review of A Continuing Education, p. 106; autumn, 1988, review of May Days, p. 140; autumn, 1993, review of Moral Instruction and Fiction for Children 1749-1820, p. 118.

Washington Post Book World, July 29, 1990, review of Still Life, p. 13.

William and Mary Quarterly, July, 1994, Melvin Yazawa, review of Moral Instruction and Fiction for Children 1749-1820, p. 577.

Wilson Library Bulletin, September, 1990, Barbara Scotto, review of Still Life, p. 119; November, 1994, Michael Tubridy, review of Trespassing, p. 134.