The house at 1458 Vinton in Midtown Memphis may have been home for decades to well-known artist Dolph Smith, but before that, it was where Vince Vawter grew up. Vawter’s book, Paperboy (Delacorte Press/Random House), is about coming of age in a city set to see some major changes too.
The novel takes place largely in Vawter’s Midtown neighborhood in 1959, and the first-person narrator is an 11-year-old named Victor Volmer III, who has taken on the paper route of a friend for the month of July. That newspaper is the Memphis Press-Scimitar, where Vawter himself once worked as a reporter before moving on to managing editor of the Knoxville News Sentinel and publisher of the Evansville Courier & Press in Indiana. That paperboy is a lot like Vawter when he was 11, but there’s enough leeway in the story to make Paperboy fiction not memoir.
Vawter has now retired with his wife to a home on 10 acres outside Knoxville, but on Tuesday, May 14th, he returns to his hometown to discuss and sign Paperboy at The Booksellers at Laurelwood, beginning at 6 p.m. It isn’t like he ever left Midtown for good, though. In a recent phone interview, Vawter talked about the writing of Paperboy, but he talked too about that house at the corner of Vinton and Melrose and about the return trips he’s made to Memphis over the years. Has he been inside the house since Vawter’s family moved to East Memphis in 1960? Or was it 1961? Vawter can’t recall the exact year. But he’s sure of one thing:
