Samuel Taylor's Hollywood Adventure

I can think of no other writer who can better express the ine able sense of being born into the working poor before moving through di erent genres of living-hired factory hand, engineer, professor, poet, then back to hired academic hand-as he searches for a sense of the real through genres of writing-memoir, ction, poetry, criticism. Samuel Taylor's Hollywood Adventure is as engrossing as any written lived experience, only more so: a meditation on what it is not to be a Hollywood celebrity, war hero, or anyone of note, but a human trying to make it, and trying to make sense of "it" as a writer who can look back and see how much of our lives are composed by the constraints of storytelling we and our societies create. Samuel Taylor's Hollywood Adventure begins with poetics, but ends as philosophy. -STEVE TOMASULA, author of VAS: An Opera in Flatland and Once Human: Stories