Reading and book signing by the delightful Mary Z. Gray, author of 301 East Capitol: Tales From the Heart of the Hill, just published by the Overbeck History Press.
A conversation with Mary Z. Gray
at Hill Center, 901 Pennsylvania Ave. S.E.
Sunday, February 12, at 2:00 p.m.
Click here for more information and to reserve a seat!
And
Mary Z. Gray returns to 301 East Capitol
A reading and signing at her childhood home,
now the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Haskell Center
301 East Capitol Street
Monday, February 13, at 1:00 p.m.
No reservation required.
To most of the world, “Capitol Hill” means the U.S. Congress. This book is about the personal side of the Hill, where for five generations a family of music makers and undertakers, homemakers and home breakers, shared a small neighborhood with the white-domed Capitol of the United States.
Washington writer Mary Z. Gray, born in 1919, brings vividly back to life the community she saw and heard from her childhood home at 301 East Capitol. Streetcars run again; newsboys reappear, shouting headlines on street corners. Tom the huckster hawks his wares from a horse-drawn wagon, as a lamplighter at dusk leaves pools of light along a dark street. And a mystery that had haunted the writer’s family for over 50 years is solved.
See Karen Lyon’s review of this remarkable book in the February edition of the Hill Rag.
“Cul de Sac” cartoonist Richard Thompson calls Gray “one of the funniest raconteurs I know.” A writer all of her adult life, she got her first by-line in the Washington Post in 1940. Since then, she has been published frequently in The Post, as well as The New York Times and many other papers. She also worked as a reporter/editor for Broadcasting Magazine in the 1940s and as a White House speechwriter during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Her book Ah Bewilderness! Muddling Through Life With Mary Z. Gray (Atheneum) was published in 1984.
301 East Capitol is also available at Capitol Hill bookstores and at www.Amazon.com.
The newly launched Overbeck History Press is a project of the Capitol Hill Community Foundation. Please remember the Foundation in your charitable giving.