EVEN THE NIGHT

Comparable to the Betsey Barton book, And Now To Live Again (Appleton-Century, 1944) for its inspirational message rather than the more astringent therapy of Out On A Limb by Louise Baker (Whittlesey, 1946), this is the autobiography of a lifetime of suffering, physical and psychological, and the struggle it imposed. Stricken with infantile paralysis as a very young child in St. Louis, Raymond recovered but did not regain the use of his legs. Here was the agony of treatments, and braces, the first year at school where the hope of happiness quickly gave way to the reality of ridicule; a new shame -- of deafness -- later in his school years; college, and a career in the short story field (Collier's, S.E.P.) -- and finally happiness in his marriage to Helen. Helen who was to die of cancer a year after the birth of their first child. The bad months which followed, of despondency, inactivity, and later severe diabetes which some time later were to be overcome and helped by remarriage. There's no self-pity here, in what is an account of extraordinary human suffering, written in the hope that it will help others.