"Adams' skills as a novelist and a biographer have been charmingly blended in this delineation of old-time upstate New York."—Atlantic
"Here is social history spiced with character, incident and humor. Here are stories to support Adams's contention that while life is easier than it used to be in the old days, it isn't half so much fun. Here, in short, are both the Adamses at their best."—Christian Science Monitor
"Adams has done no more charming book than these reminiscences of a boyhood in upper New York State. . . . local history, biography, or any category you please; but libraries should have it."—Library Journal
About the Author
Samuel Hopkins Adams (1871-1958) was a truly remarkable man. There are at least three phases to his career as a writer: early muckraking, which resulted in the kind of food-and-drug legislation more often credited to Upton Sinclair's Jungle; the flamboyant period of the 1920s, when under the pen name of Warner Fabian he wrote about "the flaming youth"; and finally, his septuagenarian discovery of his native upstate New York in fiction and memoir. Grandfather Stories, published in 1955, presents the gentle and humorous yarns spanning the towns and villages of the Erie Canal that Adams first heard in childhood from his grandfathers.
April 1989