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Young. I was young. I was too young to remember much of anything.
That was the refrain I was getting from the He
Hugh He
I started with a Web search on Hugh’s name. It told me that he had written three books, with more than a few years between publication of each. All three were considered to be largely semiautobiographical. The first, Twilight, was an indictment of his parents’ slowly withering marriage in suburban Atlanta. The second, The Cha
He
A photo surfaced among the reviews that the Web search turned up. In it I saw a younger incarnation of the invalid I’d seen sleeping at Park Christian Hospital. He was a slight man with thin sandy hair and eyes that looked a pale blue, and his expression was, if not pinched, not quite at ease. His publisher’s Web site also posted his author bio, clearly from the back of Rainbow.
With his first novel, Twilight, published at age 25, Hugh He
I was wrong, though, in expecting to find interviews with He
The longest piece, “A Rainbow in Shadow,” was written for The New York Times Magazine by a former Pioneer Press reporter named Patrick Healy, to coincide with the publication of A Rainbow at Night. I started with his work, and followed up with two other pieces that had run in national magazines.
This is the story that emerged.
Hugh He
Emory University granted Hugh a partial academic scholarship, despite his parents’ comfortable finances. It was at Emory that Hugh He
The three were inseparable during their first two years at school. After that, Campion and He
Literally on the eve of their departure, He
They refined taconite on the Range. They harvested hard red winter wheat in South Dakota. They worked in the shipyards of Duluth, once an outlaw border town. They traveled south to see the New Orleans where He
The New Orleans mug shots ran along with Healy’s story. Campion, dark and thin, was appropriately resigned and surly in his, but He
Smiling. I couldn’t figure that out for a minute, but then I realized: well-bred, middle-class Hugh He
Somewhere in that interim period, He
As friends of He
“Twilight was perceived, or perhaps misperceived, as a sweeping condemnation of the mores and priorities of the New South,” wrote Healy. “Reviews of the book were distinctly cooler in the Southern press. One can extrapolate how it might have been viewed among He
Mi
Again using fictional characters that clearly sprouted off his family tree, The Cha