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Stephen Davenport

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My first full-time job, after graduating from college and then spending two years in the Navy as the Korean War wound down, was as a Wall Street banker. I chose that work because my wife and I wanted to live in NYC and go to theater as often as we could afford, and also because it was an acceptable screen for a young privileged WASP to hide behind while I wrote the Great American Novel.

By staying up late every night, I managed to produce the most self-indulgent, sophomoric novel every written – except perhaps by people who were actually still sophomores –and I mean in high school! Somehow, it managed to get the attention of an editor at Doubleday who wrote me a few pages on how I might rewrite it to make it publishable. I wasn’t sure wheth My first full-time job, after graduating from college and then spending two years in the Navy as the Korean War wound down, was as a Wall Street banker. I chose that work because my wife and I wanted to live in NYC and go to theater as often as we could afford, and also because it was an acceptable screen for a young privileged WASP to hide behind while I wrote the Great American Novel.

By staying up late every night, I managed to produce the most self-indulgent, sophomoric novel every written – except perhaps by people who were actually still sophomores –and I mean in high school! Somehow, it managed to get the attention of an editor at Doubleday who wrote me a few pages on how I might rewrite it to make it publishable. I wasn’t sure whether he was sincere, or rewarding my wife, who worked at Doubleday, for doing her boss’s work in the afternoons while he recuperated from his lunch composed exclusively of martinis. At any rate, I started to rewrite, and soon found I could not. In the time it took to compose the novel, I had outgrown its premise entirely. So I buried the manuscript under the shirts in my bottom bureau drawer and decided to take some time off from my writing to catch up on my sleep.

But I couldn’t sleep. Because now, without the novel to think about, I thought about how ardently I didn’t want to get up in the morning and spend the whole day pretending to be a banker. I would have been less troubled if my act were not successful, but everyone at the bank, including several enthusiastic mentors, thought I had chosen my career. I was amazed that no one caught me out. I would have confessed: this is not me, but that didn’t happen, and I was soon promoted to the next rung up on the young executive’s ladder. My parents were delighted and relieved. Their son was climbing upwards along an acceptable path. But my college friends, when I told them I was a banker, either laughed, thinking I was joking, or looked concerned. Soon I’d own a house in the suburbs, take the train to the City every morning, reading the Wall Street Journal, like a character in a story by John Cheever. A perfectly fine life for some, but not for me. I felt trapped, powerless, parading through life in someone else’s identity, and vaguely suicidal. Inside New York’s tall buildings, I didn’t go near the windows.

I started perusing employment advertising in The New York Times, and happened upon one for a teacher of English and coach of football, basketball and track at a boarding school. I loved literature. I loved sports. So I applied. The position had come open too close to the beginning of the academic year for the school to have time to interview more than a very few candidates. That’s why I got the job. It was one of the luckiest days of my life.

For the next thirty years, except for a short spate of free-lance journalism in which I was lucky enough to place articles in the New York Times Magazine about conservation and an article in The Saturday Review on how African-American boys and girls were faring in elite private schools, I didn’t write. I didn’t have the emotional energy left over, let alone the time, to make up characters and vicariously live their lives, as a novelist must. I found that purveying to the still supple hearts of teenagers my passion for literature was all the satisfaction I needed–which is not to say that it was easy, nor that I was always successful. I loved the idiosyncratic cultures in which I worked and which I ultimately led as Head of School. It was easy to always try to do one’s best. How much success or failure was mine was for others to say, but I never had to ask, nor did my colleagues, Why am I doing this?

And besides, I never had to wear a suit!

I spent three years teaching English and coaching sports at Trinity-Pawling School, an all-boys boarding school in Pawling, NY; then thirteen years doing the same work at Kingswood-Oxford School, in West Hartford, CT, where I was privileged to have br ...more

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Stephen Davenport’s books

Average rating: 3.75 · 150 ratings · 48 reviews · 7 distinct works • Similar authors

	Saving Miss Oliver's 3.31 avg rating — 65 ratings — published 2005 — 7 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	NINETY-DAY WONDER: How The Navy Would Have Been Better Off Without Me 4.34 avg rating — 35 ratings — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	No Ivory Tower: Book Two Of The Miss Oliver's School For Girls Saga 3.74 avg rating — 31 ratings — published 2016 — 5 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Encampment (Miss Oliver's School for Girls, #3) 4.16 avg rating — 19 ratings — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	A Description of the New-invented Table Air-pump: With the Manner of Performing the Most Curious Experiments Upon It: the Figures of the Air-pump Glasses, and all the Machines Belonging to It 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Berkeley Fiction Review, Volume 19 by Berkeley Fiction Review, John Rauschenberg (Editor), Elaine Wong (Editor) 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Innovations in Tax Compliance: Building Trust, Navigating Politics, and Tailoring Reform by Roel Dom, Anna Custers, Stephen Davenport (Goodreads Author) 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

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VERA, A NOVEL BY Carol Edgarian

[

Forget the history books. If you really want to know what it was like to live – or die- in San Francisco when the 1906 earthquake hit, put yourself in the hands of master storyteller Carol Edgarian, get a copy of her novel Vera, published in 2021, and start reading.

Right away you will meet the fifteen-year-old Vera who tells the story. She is the illegitimate daughter of Rose, San Franci Read more of this blog post »

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Miss Oliver's School for Girls (3 books)
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Stephen Davenport (Goodreads Author)

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Stephen Davenport liked a quote “Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. ” ...more Jeffrey Eugenides
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Quotes by Stephen Davenport (?)

“Later it will occur to him that checking your feelings, holding them inside where they burn, is what a leader has to do. Every day.”
― Stephen Davenport, Saving Miss Oliver's

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“He only knows great teachers can bore into someone else's mind like this -- only they have this kind of power. Maybe that's why teachers are paid so little: what they earn has more power than money.”
― Stephen Davenport

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Stephen’s Quotes

“The thing women have yet to learn is nobody gives you power. You just take it. ”
― Roseanne Barr

tags: feminism, power, women

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“Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.”
― Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam

tags: paraphrase-of-congreve

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“Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.”
― Oscar Wilde

tags: power, sex

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“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein

tags: attributed-no-source, human-nature, humor, infinity, philosophy, science, stupidity, universe

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“Dream as if you will live forever; Live as if you will die today.”
― James Dean

tags: advice-for-daily-living, aspirations, carpe-diem, inspirational

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message 1: by Stephen

May 15, 2013 09:14AM

I'm reading Madame Bovary - which I read so long ago that it feels very much like a first-time read. Maybe I never read it, but that's hard to believe. I appreciate Flaubert's essentially starting realism, and I am intrigued by the contrast between Madame;s opinion of her marriage and her husband's. But I've been waiting a very long time for the big event, and the piling on of what seems to me to be unnecessary description engenders some snoozing, This is really a comment on a narrative pace that was acceptable when novels had so much less competition for attention than they do now.

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Stephen’s Year In Books

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