Strephon Kaplan-Williams Books

• Welcome
• Oscar Williams
• Gene Derwood
• Strephon Williams
• Poetics
• Contact

Why am I writing about my father, Oscar Williams, and my mother, Gene Derwood, now in the older years of my life? I look at the skyline of New York that we have pictured here and I see the buildings, yes, but also the thousands of significant people who have made their lives in New York City. Those buildings come alive again for me. They house real people who moved from all over uncultured America to live in the highest culture of the world at the time, Twentieth Century America in New York City, with its adjunct in Chicago!

My parents were immigrants to New York City. My father came from Russia as a small boy of six in around 1906 and grew up in Brooklyn. My mother escaped home in her teenage years from the MidWest and arrived in New York City. Gene and Oscar met each other in the offices of a literary magazine, maybe in 1921, and married three days later, as Oscar used to tell it. True love at first sight? More like literary intuition. They saw in each other the love of poetry and the arts. They saw in each other a high intelligence and a driving ambition, even then at a young age, for immortality through writings that would endure.

Did they achieve their lofty ambitions of youth? Do any of us achieve our high potentials and thirst of the soul, so dominant when we enter adult life?

I am here to tell about it. I am their son, a somewhat published writer myself, and expert in a different field than they chose. My mother said I would never be a writer but a psychologist. That was my fate. I am a psychologist, and a rather well-known one at that. Yet, despite such a destiny I now take up my love of writing again and apply it to this memoir on my parents and growing up as their son.

I never chose to live in New York City, nor was I allowed to for long, since they sent me off to boarding school at age six, never to return home again to live. But I knew them in New York for two weeks every Christmas. I knew the cowboy movies with my father at 42nd St. and Times Square. I knew midnight Christmas mass with my mother at St. John The Divine Cathedral. I did not lack the New York experience.

I honor my parents here, but life is not all roses and so this New York Life will not be roses only either. I welcome this blog and honor much of what they were with it. I welcome all who come forward to support this new kind of publishing on the Web and in the book I am now writing, The Life And Death Of Oscar Williams. I thank Ineke Duursema, a special friend and admirer of my mother, Gene Derwood. She is the coordinator for this blog and also the Dreamwork site, and committed to it for years.

For any inadequacies and failings here, please address yourself to yours truly. As the one and only son, I am not exactly unbiased. As an imaginative writer I may dramatize a bit here and there. As a psychologist I may penetrate into some scary places, but always with the hope of redemption. As a person also I hope to paint with words in compassion and fun, enjoying the plastering of words as a high and inspiring art in itself.

If you join us, welcome!