The Fading Smile

"A beautiful and richly instructive book, a worthy and welcome sequel to Eileen Simpson's Poets in Their Youth." —Louis S. Auchincloss

An intimately perceptive account, by a poet who knew them all—Robert Frost, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich—the brilliant circle of poets who lived and worked in Boston during "one of the most vital milieux for poetry in the history of our country."

"Davison's approach is both novel and illuminating. He presents his authors individually [and as] a group, carefully tracing their relation to one another....He is the ultimate literary Boston insider." —Dana Gioia, Washington Post Book World

Peter Davison gives us "brilliant young people pushing themselves to the limit, emotionally, intellectually, and often financially, for the love of a most unremunerative art." —Walter Kirn, New York magazine

Peter Davison, an editor for the Atlantic, lives in Boston.