Rejoining the Common Reader: Essays, 1962-1990

by Clara Claiborne Park, Howard Nemerov (Foreword)

Rejoining the Common Reader is suffused with the impulse that motivates Clara Claiborne Park's distinguished writing and the desire to related literature to the experience of its readers. This humane, balanced, and entertaining book will appeal to anyone who longs to recapture the pleasure of reading for personal enrichment and to teachers of literature who have grown to resent the intrusiveness of theory and theorizing and wish to reexamine what they are doing to, for, and with their students.

231 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1991

About the author

Clara Justine Claiborne graduated from Radcliffe College in 1944. She married physicist David Park in 1945, and they both attended the University of Michigan, where she earned a master's degree in 1949, majoring in English literature. They moved to Massachusetts in 1951, where Park taught at Berkshire Community College and then at Williams College, where she was on the faculty from 1975 to 1994.

She and her husband had four children, of whom one, the artist Jessica Park, was autistic. Her book 'The Siege', about Jessica's first eight years, was the first major challenge to the idea that autism was caused by the parents. The followup 'Exiting Nirvana' continued the story of Jessica and her family.