Laurie Lee | photo: Keith Waldegrave/Rex Features
In Great Britain, Laurie Lee is a major minor figure. He was a literary insider for decades (famously holding court at the Chelsea Arts Club in London) and wrote numerous travel pieces in London newspapers. He might be forgotten as a poet—just try to get any of his half-dozen books of poetry that date back to his first in 1944—but is still notable for his trilogy of memoirs, Cider with Rosie (1959), As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969), and A Moment of War (1991). Today, almost seventeen years after his death, Lee is still especially well known in Great Britain—mostly because of a test.
For many decades, Cider with Rosie was a required text for O-levels, the old British testing system. Many of my relatives and friends read Cider with Rosie as sixteen-year-olds and had consigned it into the same place Americans often toss To Kill a Mockingbird or The Great Gatsby—one of those books high school English teachers forced you to read, but, no matter how good it might be, you’ll never return to it.
His books are in print in the United States but hardly anyone has read him (Cider with Rosie was originally published in America as The Edge of Day: A Boyhood in the West of England.) I got turned on to Lee when I spent a summer writing in my grandparents’ cabin in New
