Light While There Is Light: An American History

A moving poetic memoir about a family on the fringes of religion and society, this unforgettable story about a mother's destructive involvement with Christian fundamentalism pulls the curtain back on the darker side of American religious experience.

Keith Waldrop's account of his mid-twentieth-century Midwestern upbringing opens a window on a uniquely American landscape of desolation and desire. Waldrop's mother, central to the book, was a devout Christian, consumed with the question of just what a Christian was. Divorced from his father--a railway man, a Mason, coming and going with the Santa Fe railroad, then gone--she moves from place to place and from sect to sect, suffering migraines and speaking in tongues, teaching piano, and sinking ever deeper into apocalyptic reveries about tribulations lying in store and the advent of Christ's return.

Then there are Waldrop's siblings: his sister on the hunt for a husband, and his loud, lounging, scapegrace older brothers in search of the next dollar and a good time, cooking up scams and leaving a mess behind. As for Waldrop, the narrator of what he describes as a fictional memoir, he looks back at those days with a peculiar detachment of his own, compassionate, quietly humorous at times, in light of which the simple facts assume a stark, near hallucinatory clarity, while scenes of life spool by like a home movie to no sound. "Neither the joys of heaven nor hell's worst prospects," Waldrop writes, "provide as forceful a motive as the mere emptiness of the world."

In Light While There Is Light, Waldrop writes in a tradition that extends back to Hawthorne, Poe, and Dreiser, as he reveals the fear, madness, and destruction lurking behind the makeshift and make-believe of American life.

Author: Keith Waldrop
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Published: 05/12/2026
Pages: 216
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.48lbs
Size: 8.00h x 5.05w x 0.48d
ISBN: 9798896230366

About the Author
Keith Waldrop (1932-2023) was born in Emporia, Kansas. He published his first book of poetry, A Windmill Near Cavalry, in 1968, and won the National Book Award for Poetry for his 2009 collection Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy. In 1961, Waldrop and his wife, Rosmarie Waldrop, founded Burning Deck, an influential small press that specialized in the publication of experimental poetry and prose. He was a professor of English at Brown University for 43 years.

Ben Lerner is the author of nine books of poetry and prose as well as several collaborations with visual artists. He is the editor of Keeping / the window open: Interviews, Statements, Alarms, Excursions, a collection exploring the lives and work of Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop.