Beca Kissed Me: A First Love in the 1950s

Beca Kissed Me is an intensely candid memoir of love, sex, and obsession among a group largely unchronicled – the intellectual young of the elite New York suburbs and colleges like Yale and Wellesley in the Silent Generation during the Cold War presidencies of Eisenhower and Kennedy. Its author, the late Richard Ward (1940-2010), tells how he and his great love, Beca Bates, struggled against the sexual proprieties of the time and ultimately lost, thus blighting both their lives. “High-brow pornography that will excite, amuse, and inform those who thought the Happy Days – American Graffiti kids had it all. A damn good read that will tear your heart out.” – John Lee, author of The Flying Boy: Healing the Wounded Man and other books. “The more I think about it, the more convinced I become that this memoir is peculiar to the Silent Generation and that no one of our cohort has spoken out so powerfully about intimacy.” – Gaines Post, Jr., author of Memoirs of a Cold War Son and Blue Bug, Red Road.