In Youth Is Pleasure & I Left My Grandfather's House

Author: Denton Welch

Publisher: Exact Change (2013)

First published in 1945, In Youth is Pleasure is a beautiful and unassuming coming-of-age novel by the English writer and painter Denton Welch (1915-1948). Painfully sensitive and sad Orville Pym is fifteen years old, and this novel recounts the summer holiday after his first miserable year at public school — but as in all of Welch’s work what is most important are the details of his characters’ surroundings. Welch is a Proustian writer of uncanny powers of observation who, as William Burroughs writes, “makes the reader aware of the magic that is right under his eyes.” Also included in this edition is the first U.S. publication of I Left my Grandfather’s House. This first-person account of a idyllic walking tour in the British countryside undertaken when Welch was eighteen makes a fascinating companion piece to the fictionalized, though no less autobiographical, In Youth is Pleasure.