These Boys and Their Fathers
ISBN: 9781609386801
Platform/Publisher: Project MUSE / University of Iowa Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Chapters; Download: Chapters
Subjects: Masculinity; Fatherless families; Fathers;

In 2010, Don Waters set out to write a magazine story about a surfing icon who had known his absentee father. It was an attempt to find a way of connecting to a man he never knew. He didn't imagine that the story would become a years-long quest to understand a man who left behind almost nothing except for a self-absorbed autobiography for his abandoned son.

These Boys and Their Fathers touches on Waters's early life with his single mother--and her string of dysfunctional men--and his later search for and encounters with his father, but it quickly expands into a gripping account of the life of a 1930s pulp writer, also named Don Waters, with whom Waters becomes obsessed. This wildly original book blends memoir, investigative reporting, and fiction to sort out difficult aspects of family, masculinity, and what it means to be a father.


Don Waters is the author of Sunland , a novel, and the two story collections The Saints of Rattlesnake Mountain and Desert Gothic . He teaches at Lewis & Clark College, and lives in Portland, Oregon.
hidden image for function call