n the end, Louis Rubin couldn’t give his heart to journalism. But he sure did some heavy courting.

From the age of 10, when he banged out a dozen misspelled copies of his own little newspaper on a portable typewriter, Rubin was smitten with writing for print. A military newspaper job didn’t cure him. Neither did various other reporting assignments, or marking copy and marking time with the persnickety old gents of the copy desk. Despite several promising forays into academia, Rubin kept bouncing back to the newsroom for more.

Why? Because he was good at it. And newspapers were a suitable prelude to the writer’s life, a la Hemingway, Mencken, and Dreiser. Journalism taught more than the mechanics of readable writing. It forced a young writer to reckon with ethical choices.

At the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Rubin wrote editorials for the brilliant, ultraconservative Jack Kilpatrick. Caught up in Kilpatrick’s heady influence, and his own nostalgia-fogged affection for the South, Rubin dallied briefly with the rhetoric of segregationism. But his heart wasn’t in it, and, by 1957, he was ready to put newspapers, and conservative polemics, behind him for good.

Rubin, emeritus professor of English, now seems immune to nostalgia. He doesn’t pine for the clatter of manual typewriters or the odor of paste pots. Today’s computer-humming newsrooms are smarter and less smug than those of his time, Rubin says. And he’s not the least bit disappointed that journalism has managed so admirably without him.

Rubin’s readers, who have admired one or more of the 50 books he has written or edited since he found his way into American letters, won’t be disappointed either. They will find, in this matter-of-fact little memoir, the adventures of a young man in rigorous training for the labors—and true loves—to come.