The Other Steve Schrader: New and Selected Writing

Publishing the book just two weeks after his ninetieth birthday, Schrader–a lifelong New Yorker– offers a vivid memoir in vignettes that captures both the arc of his own life and the portrait of a shifting 20th century New York.  Schrader’s autobiographical sketches reveal a writer processing the evolution and moments of resonance in his life, and the changing of a city and world around him.

Rich with autobiographical sketches that will recall those of Annie Dillard in An American Childhood and Tobias Wolff in This Boy’s Life, Schrader traces his journey from a daydreaming child of the 1930s Upper West Side to the anxieties and desires of a postwar adolescence, to the tensions of a creative impulse and a drive to prove himself to his father and brother amid the family clothing business. Schrader crafts an intimate portrait of his tangled relationship with the creative impulse, the making of money, and his family.

The stories Schrader unearths—told with hilarity, tenderness, and an incredible eye for detail—surprise and delight. Readers are treated to memories ranging from the surprising (watching his teenage brother spar with the son of gangster Meyer Lansky at the boxing gym–and then pulling on his legs to help him get tall enough to be admitted to West Point), to the unfortunate (he describes the lifelong regret of having left a 1961 Greenwich Village folk show just before a young Bob Dylan took the stage), to the tender and the heartbreaking.  “Even now my neck turns red at the memory,” he says of an elementary school incident in which he fails to stand up for a bullied classmate.