Sunday Morning in Fascist Spain: A European Memoir, 1948-1953. By Willis Barnstone. Published by Southern Illinois University Press in 1995.
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Focusing on the five years Willis Barnstone spent following his graduation from Bowdoin College, the years of living, thinking, and beginning to write in France, Greece, Italy, Switzerland, Spain, and England from 1948 to 1953, this fascinating and moving memoir nonetheless expands beyond those years. On one side of that period are the poet and translator's grandparents' immigration to the United States, his parents' stormy relationship and his father's eventual suicide, his childhood growing up in the building where Babe Ruth lived, his first gestures toward a life of poetry in Hawthorne's room at Bowdoin, and his first acquaintance with cultures other than his own while digging privies in remote Indian villages in Mexico during a year off from college. On the other side of that period are Barnstone's continuing life as the gypsy scholar in China, Tibet, Turkey, and Argentina and his continuing friendship with his children and former wife and the finest writers and artists the world over.

Barnstone writes with elan of the perfect apprenticeship for a poet-- a half decade of vagabond adventure in Paris, the Greek Islands, Andalusian Spain, London, and many other romantic spots in Europe and Morocco. His is the life most young writers dream of living. A poet always-even when writing prose-he tells of times with the great poets and writers of the period. A mere recitation of the names will excite the literate. Barnstone does far more than recite names. Like Hemingway writing of the 1920s, he has written an elegantly gripping "moveable feast" about an entire generation of writers.

"This is the life story told in the from of an episodic memoir of a scholar gypsy making his way through the countries of his heart's desire ...while pausing to teach, particularly at Indiana University, where in his 'cement tower' he spins out poems, translations, and his far-flung learning of the Bible, literary theory, and Chinese poetry in countless books. It is all a high-spirited story full of literary and erotic gossip, reminiscent of the romantic 1920s, of a man of hope living his life to the fullest."
--Edwin Honig, Brown University