Endless Love (55 page)
This photo, taken around 1945, features four of the people who most influenced Spencer’s life. His father, Charles, is seen in his military uniform (second from the right), with Spencer’s aunt Elfride and uncle Harold to Charles’s right and his mother, Jean, to Charles’s left. Elfride and Harold both moved to Cuba after the 1960 Cuban Revolution.
Spencer’s fourth grade class at Burnham Elementary School on Chicago’s South Side. Spencer is in the second row, fifth from the left.
Scott and Charles on vacation in Arizona around 1958.
Spencer with Victoria Wilson, his editor at Knopf. Wilson edited many of his books, including
Endless Love
,
Waking the Dead
, and
Preservation Hall
. The two have remained friends.
An exhausted Spencer holding his newborn daughter, Celeste, at Roosevelt Hospital in New York City in 1979. Celeste is now a painter living in Brooklyn.
Celeste in 1984, standing in front of the Spencer house on the South Side of Chicago. Spencer remembers Celeste as being determinedly artistic throughout her childhood.
Spencer and his son, Asher, in New Orleans, Asher’s mother’s hometown, in 1987. Asher now lives in Brooklyn and is working toward his PhD in economics from CUNY.
Asher on vacation he took with his father to St. Petersburg, Russia, in front of a restored war ship that the Bolsheviks used to fire upon the Winter Palace during the Russian Revolution.
Celeste with her dog, Oliver, in Rhinebeck, New York, taken while she was studying at Bard College.
Charles Spencer, Scott’s father, reading a selection from his second book,
Left
,
Two Three
(1986), in a Chicago bookstore, with Scott’s children Celeste and Asher listening on.
Nominees at the PEN/Faulkner Award ceremony in 1995. Among those present are Spencer (front row, second from left), George Plimpton (back row, center), Francine Prose (back row, second from left), and Mary Lee Settle (front row, fourth from right).
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Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Doubleday & Company, Inc.: Excerpt from “I Am a Book I Neither Wrote nor Read,” copyright © 1959 by Delmore Schwartz from
Summer Knowledge
,
New and Selected Poems
, 1938, 1958 by Delmore Schwartz. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Shapiro, Bernstein & Co., Inc.: Excerpt from the song “Cry” by Churchill Kohlman as recorded by Johnnie Ray. Copyright MCMLI. Renewed by Shapiro, Bernstein & Co., Inc. New York, NY 10022. Used by permission.