SOURCE: "An Acceptance of Life That Is Also an Embrace," in The New York Times Book Review, March 27, 1960, p. 4.

Matthews is an American-born editor, essayist, poet, autobiographer, and biographer. In the following review, he praises Cider with Rosie, also published as The Edge of Day, as "funny, unsentimental and beautiful."

Suicide, said Camus, is the one really serious philosophical problem. The only simple answer to the questionable human condition is the act that ends all problems. Any other answer ignores the question or shelves the problem. And yet there is another sort of response, oblique as morning sunlight, irrational as joy, absurd as a human being—an acceptance of life that is also a welcoming and an embrace. Perhaps this response is less rare than we suppose, but only a poet can put it into words.

Laurie Lee has done it. Blessed be his name. These recollections of...