First published in 1945, "In Youth Is Pleasure" is a beautiful and unassuming co
ming-of-age novel by the English writer and painter Denton Welch (1915-1948). Pa
infully sensitive and sad Orville Pym is 15 years old, and this novel recounts t
he summer holiday after his first miserable year at public school--but as in all
of Welch's work, what is most important are the details of his characters' surr
oundings. Welch is a Proustian writer of uncanny powers of observation who, as W
illiam S. Burroughs wrote, "makes the reader aware of the magic that is right un
der his eyes." Film director John Waters includes this novel as one of his "Five
Books You Should Read to Live a Happy Life If Something Is Basically the Matter
with You," and writes: "Maybe there is no better novel in the world than Denton
Welch's "In Youth Is Pleasure." Just holding it in my hands, so precious, so be
yond gay, so deliciously subversive, is enough to make illiteracy a worse social
crime than hunger." Also included in this edition is the first U.S. publication
of "I Left My Grandfather's House." This first-person account of an idyllic wal
king tour in the British countryside undertaken when Welch was 18 makes a fascin
ating companion piece to the fictionalized, though no less autobiographical, "In
Youth Is Pleasure."
