Orpheus in the Bronx

Reginald Shepherd was one of those rare figures whose difficult childhood, which should have thwarted any great accomplishment, spurred him on to exactly that. Born in 1963 and raised mostly in the Bronx by his single mother, Shepherd oscillated between inner-city public schools and, funded by scholarships and government support, private, posh day schools. Ostracized at the former for being smart and at the latter for being "poor and black," his early experience of the world was one of estrangement. "Even when I found someone whom I thought actually understood me," Shepherd would later write, "I would always eventually come up against a wall between us." This sense of being lost in a world in which he did not belong was compounded by his mother's early death. She was his sole attachment to the physical world beside books, and when she died, Shepherd would later write, "the world ended." He was fifteen at the time.