About Maury Klein
The hardest question I have to answer is the one most other people find easiest to field: Where are you from?
I was born March 14, 1939, in Memphis, Tennessee, but left after a few months for somewhere else and so don’t have any memories of it. My childhood was a procession of moves that lasted into my sophomore year in high school. To this day I cannot reconstruct the chronology of my own early years—where we lived and in what sequence, where I went to school in what grades. I know I missed all of one year of school and half of another but don’t know which grades. On at least three occasions, in Cincinnati, Richmond, and Hollywood, I went to parochial rather than public schools. Seventh grade I remember beginning in Salt Lake City, moving to Hollywood, then to some other stops before ending the school year in Columbia, South Carolina. I averaged three schools a year until my sophomore year in high school, when the procession finally stopped. After starting that year in Amarillo, Texas, we moved in October to Denver, where we stayed long enough for me to finish high school.
The moves resulted from my father’s work as a supervisor or troubleshooter in different chains of women’s clothing stores, and also from family instability. I was the only child of two people who could not have been more different from each other. They separated several times, divorced, remarried, and divorced again. My father was a Polish Jew whose parents had come to Chicago in the 1920s; my mother was the daughter of a prominent physician in Louisville, Kentucky. She was the black sheep among seven siblings, having gone off to sing with a band even before thrilling her parents by marrying a divorced Jew. Her father was a Scot, her mother Irish, which made me about as ecumenical as one can get. They belonged to the Church of Christ but my grandmother never quite lost her Catholic roots. I was baptized in the Edenside Christian Church in Louisville but also went to parochial schools. All my life people have assumed I was Jewish, but my father never practiced his religion and I never stepped foot inside a synagogue. What little I knew about Judaism came from a comparative religions course in college.
In many ways my life began at East Denver High School, which gave me a wonderful education and the first social stability I had ever known. Books were not a big thing in our home, but as an only child I tended to read anything I could get my hands on. To this day I can’t remember whether I’ve actually read some great novels or simply knew them through reading the Classic Comic Book versions. East Denver gave me a love of learning that only grew during my four years at Knox College. A small, liberal arts college that paid close attention to its students, Knox shaped my future, my values, and the activities I still love most in life. From there I went on to graduate work at Emory University in Atlanta, where I again had the great good luck to find outstanding teachers and role models. In 1964 I came to the University of Rhode Island to begin a teaching career that, to my astonishment, continued there for 44 years. I figure I must have liked living in Rhode Island, which was my first stop in New England.
I started writing when I was eighteen because it was the only way I knew how to express myself. If I had had the talent or training, I would have been a musician. I couldn’t dance, and I took up acting much later in life as a hobby but never wanted to try doing it for a living. I became a professor because I had absolutely no clue as to how one earned a living as a writer. I figured that I could support myself teaching long enough to become a fulltime writer. It worked out that way, though it took a lot longer than I ever dreamed. I became a historian because it occurred to me that in a history class one could teach anything that interested him. I also believe that the time I spent in so many towns in so many states aroused in me a deep love of and curiosity about the people and history of this country. Perhaps that is why one of the most recurrent themes in my work is the most basic question of all: what is an American?