Shade and Family
The structure is notoriously difficult to unravel, but most readers agree that Shade is a poet married to his teenage sweetheart, Sybil. Their only child, a daughter named Hazel, apparently committed suicide some time before the novel's action begins. Shade lives in the college town of New Wye, amidst the Appalachian Mountains. His fame is sufficient for television pundits to often mention him in the same breath (just "one oozy footprint behind") as his fellow poet Robert Frost, an association which Shade does not entirely enjoy, perhaps because Frost is always mentioned first.
Read more about this topic: John Shade
Famous quotes containing the words shade and, shade and/or family:
“We lay long in the immense tide
Of shade and shadowy desire
And saw the dusk assail the wall,
The black surge, mounting, crash the stone!
Companion of this lust, we fall,
I said lest we should die alone.”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)
“Giles Lacey: I say, old boy, I’m trying to find exactly what your wife does do.
Maxim de Winter: She sketches a little.
Giles Lacey: Sketches. Oh not this modern stuff, I hope. You know, portrait of a lamp shade upside down to represent a soul in torment.”
—Robert E. Sherwood (1896–1955)
“Every family has one passage of scripture they stumble over.”
—Chinese proverb.