“This is a powerful book on several levels. Hampton’s personal story, while indelibly unique, is a deeply American bildungsroman involving West and East, the theme of The Great Gatsby; but the more pertinent and recent antecedents would be Russell Baker, Matthew Desmond, or particularly John Williams’s Stoner, which documents the awakening power of literature for a modestly circumstanced young man who becomes an academic. As a chronicle of an American life of great interest, it should be widely read.”

– Geoffrey Galt Harpham, former director of the National Humanities Center and author of The Humanities and the Dream of America

“Timothy Hampton stubbornly seeks to capture the brass ring of a liberal education only to find it often just beyond his grasp. Like the locked gate that bars him from visiting his family’s homestead, the barriers are multilayered. His own sense of ethics (we do not trespass), the oppressive expressions of ownership, and his outsider’s awkwardness work against him, but in literary study Hampton finds generosity, community, and validation that transcends social class, borders, and time.”

– Nancy Cook, professor emerita of English at Montana State University and former president of the Western Literature Association

“A beautifully written tale of a tumultuous journey from the badlands of southwestern Colorado to the academic peaks of Princeton and Berkeley in which Hampton traces two lives. One is his own—a stumble-ahead coming-of-age story that begins in a grim, closed-off place and moves into a world that felt unobtainable until, through his great love of books, he was living it. The other is that of his armless, bullied, and unkind father, whose own potential brilliance lies buried in a frozen earth. Haunting.”

– Arlie Russell Hochschild, author of Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

"If your childhood is marked by poverty or rural isolation, going to college is often seen as a supreme achievement—a victory over all the malignant forces keeping your kind out. Tim Hampton's deeply felt memoir shows us what that achievement can cost, and also what goes wrong in higher ed when class mobility becomes an afterthought."

– Matt Wray, author of White Trash: Race and Class in America