Shade and Family
The structure is notoriously difficult to unravel, but most readers agree that Shade is a poet married to his teenage sweetheart, Sybil. Their only child, a daughter named Hazel, apparently committed suicide some time before the novel's action begins. Shade lives in the college town of New Wye, amidst the Appalachian Mountains. His fame is sufficient for television pundits to often mention him in the same breath (just "one oozy footprint behind") as his fellow poet Robert Frost, an association which Shade does not entirely enjoy, perhaps because Frost is always mentioned first.
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Famous quotes containing the words shade and, shade and/or family:
“We lay long in the immense tide
Of shade and shadowy desire
And saw the dusk assail the wall,
The black surge, mounting, crash the stone!
Companion of this lust, we fall,
I said lest we should die alone.”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)
“Women hock their jewels and their husbands’ insurance policies to acquire an unaccustomed shade in hair or crêpe de chine. Why then is it that when anyone commits anything novel in the arts he should be always greeted by this same peevish howl of pain and surprise? One is led to suspect that the interest people show in these much talked of commodities, painting, music, and writing, cannot be very deep or very genuine when they so wince under an unexpected impact.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“If you have this enormous talent, it’s got you by the balls, it’s a demon. You can’t be a family man and a husband and a caring person and be that animal. Dickens wasn’t that nice a guy.”
—Dustin Hoffman (b. 1937)