About this item

Kaufman's Hill opens with a prosaic neighborhood scene: The author and some other young boys are playing by the creek, one of their usual stomping grounds. But it soon becomes clear that much more is going on; the boy-narrator is struggling to find his way in a middle-class Catholic neighborhood dominated by bullies, the Creelys, who often terrify him. It's the Pittsburgh of the early and mid-1960s, a threshold time just before the full counter culture arrives, and a time when suburban society begins to encroach on Kaufman's Hill, the boy's sanctuary and the setting of many of his adventures. As the hill and the 1950s vanish into the twilight, so does the world of the narrator s boyhood. "My pappy says if you re going to be afraid of everything, you may as well live in the sewer" are the words that first open the narrator's eyes.