Revere Beach Elegy Author:Roland Merullo The author of the acclaimed novel Revere Beach Boulevard writes his own story of place, class, family, and love In Revere Beach Elegy, Roland Merullo returns to his childhood heaven of Revere, Massachusetts, a place, five miles from Boston, where the affirmation of familyfifty cousins, grandparents, aunts and uncles that are more like mo... more »thers and fathersand the tough codes of his gritty working-class neighborhood form an insular world almost impossible to leave. In one of the most indelible essays in American literature by a son about his father, Merullo writes of his second-generation Italian-American father, a man whose drive and pride are a crucible for his oldest son. He tells the story of being plucked from McKinley Junior High School to become a scholarship boy at the elite Exeter Academy, where his trajectory toward "something softer and richer, something said to resemble success" begins, shakily. His later travelsto the former USSR, to Micronesia as a Peace Corps volunteer, and eventually to Italy, where the annoyances of family travel resolve themselves, for a moment, into a taste of the sacredcompose pieces of what is in the end a daring and heartrending spiritual autobiography, one in which place and class are as critical as prayer.« less