The Difficulty at the Beginning quartet follows John Dupre from his awkward high-school years in the late 1950s through the burgeoning counterculture movement of the early 1960s to the tumultuous and devastating late-1960s political and psychedelic underground.

Each of the four volumes is written in the style of the times. In Running the façade of post-WWII American optimism is just beginning to crack. Morgantown hums and throbs with the freewheeling energy and free-floating angst of youth pushing against the boundaries of social acceptability. Lyndon Johnson and the Majorettes situates the anxiety of the years following Kennedy’s assassination and the impending threat of the Vietnam draft in the oppressive heat of a West Virginia summer. In the final volume, Looking Good, all the currents of the high sixties draw together in an explosive climax.

By any measure, Difficulty at the Beginning is a major addition to American and Canadian literature, a brilliant and supremely readable social chronicle that ranks with the best of North American fiction.