Most husbands reach the place in a marital relationship at which they must either swear out loud, go to Joe's Bar and Grill, or retreat ostrich-fashion into a love nest. In the case of Addison Stubbs, none of these outlets was feasible. He had a shockingly poor memory for swear words; he would have felt as diffident as a giraffe at Joe's Bar and Grill; and Hilaria, his wife, had the run of his only love nest, a work bench in the cellar. For these reasons, perhaps it was inevitable that he should have crawled under the porch to hide.

-- from The Husband Who Ran Away (1948)

He looked even smaller in my living room than he had in the hallway. He wasn't quite as tall as I am in flat heels-- five feet four-- and he wore a cream-colored jacket that was too wide and too long for him, chocolate gabardine slacks, and brown-and-white buckskin shoes. He was perhaps twenty-five, and his face and head were too pointed for his stubbly crew cut, but his brown eyes were round and friendly. On his upper lip there was a faint little mustache-- the sort you'd draw with a burnt natch-- and it gave him a look of hopeful innocence.

-- from "Give a Sharp Leap" (1959)

Forty-niners who'd passed through the gold rush and now swaggered to Oil Creek expecting a rather panty-waist operation with effete Easterners and rubes, complained that conditions here crazier than anything they'd ever seen. One miner said that if a new well brought up huge gold nuggets, the owner would throw them back and go on drilling -- for oil. This may have been a slight exaggeration.

--- from The Great oildorado (1959)

A radiant new capitalist, I commuted to New Jersey six days a week from Greenwich Village and shared an office with Freda Kordhauser. She was a tall woman, deliberate in movement, with big breasts, big hips, and unexpectedly slim legs. Her hair was Indian-black and long. When it was coiled into a glossy knot, and when she wore powder and lipstick, she had a kind of ugly-woman attractiveness. On her bad days, her hair and clothes seemed to be all loose ends, and the sallow skin on her large face, always faintly mottled, would flame with red markings. On my first day at work I thought she was rather repellent. She must have thought the same thing about me. Taking me around to introduce me to my colleagues, she was wearily polite, but once, when I acknowledged an introduction by bobbing and smiling, she said, "Out here, it isn't really necessary to curtsy."

--from "Proletariat with Duncan Phyfe Legs" (1951)

If you read this collection of first-person pieces straight through in one sitting, you may end up wanting to shoot the author between the I's. So let's not be too hasty. The great advantage of a book of this sort is that you can put it down at any time, even in the bathtub, or read it in dribbles between War and Peace, or lend it to a ten-month-old baby who likes something soft to chew on.

At the time I knew Lolly best, she was in her late thirties. I first met her when she was illustrating a story of mine for a ladies' magazine that specialized in recipes with happy endings. She phoned to ask if she might come to see me and get my ideas, which surprised me because usually illustrators seem to prefer not even to read the story aloud, for fear their imaginations might get mucked up by the facts.

-- from A Growing Wonder (1957)

On the blossoming May day the wagonload pulled up before the Drakes' little rented house (they had long since moved out of the hotel), Drake was too ill to take Smith to the well, but he sat up in bed talking feverishly to the solid-as-a-barrel blacksmith. Later he said thankfully, "I could not have suited myself better if I could have had a man made to order." They must have made a strange twosome; Smith, called "Uncle Billy," was a short, broad, hefty, laconic man who might have posed for Longfellow under a spreading chestnut burr. Whether or not he really believed in the [project at first, he soon felt a protective devotion to Drake. When he was offered a smithy job in Franklin at $4 a day, he told his son, "I can't quit Drake now."

from The Great Oildorado (1959)