Publications Home | Table of Contents
One Class, One War, 222 Stories |  Three Visions, Three Schools 
A Gender Agenda | From 'Jeopardy' to Final Jeopardy 
Author, Author   | Andover Bookshelf  |  Shuman Admission Center 
News Notes  |  Alumni News  |  Phillips Academy Home

AUTHOR, AUTHOR
Phillips Academy counts among its alumni and faculty many prominent writers.
In this issue, the magazine highlights five who are making a mark on the literary scene.
The "Andover Bookshelf" section that follows makes note of some recent works
by these and other members of the community.

Page 5

Shelby Tucker

Last summer saw the publication in London of Among Insurgents: Walking Through Burma by Shelby Tucker ’53. It describes just one, although possibly the most remarkable, of Tucker's voyages. Each has required the author to overcome discouragement and obstacles of a kind that would deter most of us. The journeys exemplify a rare determination.

A week after graduating from Andover, Tucker was on a tanker bound for Venezuela. Two summers later, he trekked across Algeria. In 1957, the Trans-Siberian railway took him to China, then under a state department ban. Next he hitchhiked around the world. "All those open horizons!" he says. "There were no ceilings, no curtains." In between, he attended Yale and received a B.A. degree in jurisprudence from Oxford and an LL.B. degree from Tulane Law School in Louisiana.

His first book, A Passage from Zephaniah, was about a trek to India that began as a simple adventure and became a religious quest. "Half a dozen publishers saw the typescript," Tucker notes, "but none evinced the slightest interest. When I read it now, it brings back good moments: a string of camels striding majestically through a dusty bazaar, egrets splayed against a pink sky. Until then, everyone had told me what I needed. Sleeping out, bathing in streams, wood fires for warmth—all this fine hobo stuff taught me what I did not need."

Two unpublished novels followed—Young Americans, in which the writer's alter ego returns home from wandering in the East, believing he has conquered all he sees, and Client Service, derived from his experiences as a sales rep for a mutual fund enterprise that collapsed after journalists demonstrated that it was an international swindle.

"It was now clear to me I would never publish," says Tucker. "The rules of publishing were other peoples' rules. If I deferred to them, I dishonored myself."

When a friend who farmed in East Africa informed him that the regime there was about to confiscate his estate, Tucker "rushed to his assistance," he says, "traveling through Sudan and into Ethiopia by camel in the last days of Haile Selassie and on to Tanzania to help my friend spend 'the last banana' of his unexportable fortune.

"From the roof of his moribund hotel we would watch the sun set over the hippos, crocks, wildebeest and baboons and the shadows spread over Kilimanjaro. It was magic." This experience was the genesis of his next unpublished book, The Last Banana.

By now Tucker was in his 50s, still hoboing, and the list of things left to do was long. One was to walk across Burma. The generals who ruled Burma had sealed the country's borders, but the regime represented none but its own narrow interests. It was another instance of deferring to other peoples' rules or his own. Characteristically, Tucker chose to follow his own instincts. He set off on a new adventure and, as usual, he wrote about it. But this time, publishers were interested.

Three weeks after Among Insurgents: Walking Through Burma was released in May 2000, London's Guardian reported that it was number one in the top 10 hardback travel books in the United Kingdom, where Tucker lives with his wife, Carole, a solicitor. The Daily Telegraph was similarly enthusiastic, saying, "It deserves to become a classic."

Wrote renowned author Tobias Wolff, "I've seldom been more aware of the thinness of the line between courage and lunacy."

Challenged on this last point, Tucker replies, "Spanish has an expression for monomania. Cada loco tiene su tema'—every lunatic has his theme. Mine, for most of my life, has been the open road, wherever it leads."

In a previous age such insatiable, eccentric curiosity contributed to filling in the empty spaces on the world's maps. Tucker demonstrates that the same rare, indomitable qualities are required of today's explorers. The barriers and the dangers may now be political, but the drive to discover persists.

—David Craton ’53

David Craton was a contemporary of Shelby Tucker as English-Speaking Union Exchange Scholar in the Class of 1953. He subsequently founded and for 20 years directed Europe's largest new product development consultancy. Retired, he now breeds horses in Dorset, England.

Page 1 2 3 4 5