Beyond This Harbor Audiobook Libro.fm

A memoir of an extraordinary lifepoet international human rights activist founding member of Amnesty International USA journalist hostess famous beauty foreign policy advisorfriend to politicians movie stars the legendary discoverer of Philip Roth longtime wife of Bill Styron and together Americas literary golden couple at home and abroad

Rose Styron has lived a life in interesting times among legendary characters a life well worth tellingand reading about The Washington Post

An intimate portrait of a celebrated magic life and the famous and infamous who dropped in summered traveled with played with and the decades of friendship with everyone from Truman Capote and Robert Penn Warren to the Kennedys the Bernsteins Alexander Calder John Hersey and Lillian Hellman

Here as well are the years of dedication and risk traveling the world from Pinochets Chile to El Salvador Belfast and Sarajevo as Rose Styron in search of those hiding from dictators and autocrats bore witness to atrocities and human rights violations

Styron writes of her childhood born into a German Jewish assimilated Baltimore family a rebel from the start studying poetry at Wellesley Harvard Johns Hopkins traveling to Rome and her second meeting with Bill the first time I cant remember even shaking hands I wasnt thinking about him at all their eventual marriage and their more than fifty years togetherin bucolic Roxbury Connecticut and on Marthas Vineyard

She writes of Bills writing and of retyping his manuscripts discussing his writing progress having babies with visits fromneighbors Arthur Miller Mike Nichols and various wives Dustin Hoffman buying the house over the hill James Baldwin moving in to Styrons writing studio and writing The Fire Next Time with Baldwin encouraging Styron to write Nat Turner in first person Frank Sinatra sailing into Vineyard Haven Harbor and soon dropping by for dinners chez Styrons the Kennedys having rowdy sleepovers

And she writes in detail about Bill Styrons fullon breakdowns his recovery from the first depression writing Darkness Visible And fifteen years later the second much worse crash Bill Styrons death her year of grief teaching at Harvard living full time on the Vineyard and making a new full life there