Childhood
Born John Florence Sullivan in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Irish Catholic parents, Allen barely knew his mother, Cecilia Herlihy Sullivan, who died of pneumonia when he was not quite three years old. His father, James Henry Sullivan, and his infant brother, Robert, were taken in by one of his mother's sisters, "my Aunt Lizzie", around whom he focused the first chapter of his second memoir, Much Ado About Me. The father was so shattered by the mother's death that, according to his son, he drank more heavily. His aunt suffered as well: her husband Michael was partially paralyzed by lead poisoning shortly after they married, leaving him mostly unable to work, something Allen remembered as causing contention among Lizzie's sisters. Eventually, Allen's father remarried and offered his sons the choice between coming with him and his new wife or staying with Aunt Lizzie. Allen's younger brother chose to go with their father, but Allen decided to stay with his aunt. "I never regretted it," he wrote.
Read more about this topic: Fred Allen
Famous quotes containing the word childhood:
“Ah happy hills! ah pleasing shade!
Ah fields beloved in vain!
Where once my careless childhood stray’d,”
—Thomas Gray (1716–1771)
“Children became an obsessive theme in Victorian culture at the same time that they were being exploited as never before. As the horrors of life multiplied for some children, the image of childhood was increasingly exalted. Children became the last symbols of purity in a world which was seen as increasingly ugly.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“Oh! mystery of man, from what a depth
Proceed thy honours. I am lost, but see
In simple childhood something of the base
On which thy greatness stands; but this I feel,
That from thyself it comes, that thou must give,
Else never canst receive. The days gone by
Return upon me almost from the dawn
Of life: the hiding-places of man’s power
Open; I would approach them, but they close.”
—William Wordsworth (1770–1850)