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Kate Simon on Her Life and Career.

Author Kate Simon. Simon is best known for her travel books (Kate Simon's Paris, New York: Places and Pleasures) and for her two vivid memoirs of coming of age in the New York City of the 1920s and 30s. The first, Bronx Primitive: Portraits in a Childhood, portrays the immigrant neighborhoods just after World War I. In the second, A Wider World: Portraits in an Adolescence, Simon recalls her tumultuous adolescence as she discovered the world beyond the neighborhoods of her youth. Her latest work, A Renaissance Tapestry, The Gonzaga of Mantua, draws on her travel writing, and her particular interest in the family dynasties that ruled Renaissance Italy.

26:43

Other segments from the episode on February 1, 1988

Fresh Air with Terry Gross, February 1, 1988: Interview with Kate Simon; Review of Paul Bley's album "Turns"; Interview with Zelda Rubenstein; Review of the television show "Smothers Brothers Comedy…

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