A Memoir of a Hero

At 11 he had a horror of death. Within six impressionable years his parents had died, and his grandmother had faded off almost imperceptibly. So to Anthony, life was a struggle against death that waited at every corner. He read until he was tired and often fell asleep with the lights still on. At 16 he had lived almost entirely within himself, and in a articulate boy, thoroughly un-American, and politely bewildered by his contemporaries.