APOLLO: AN AMERICAN LIFE guides us back to a time of growing up in the Midwestern United States, circa the 1950s-1960s. The novella is an accomplished literary 'survival' narrative which details a baby-boom childhood in the midst of an emotionally challenged period family.

Author Michael D. Main began with an award-winning short story ("Filling Stations") and -over the course of a decade- expanded this initial narrative into an absorbing autobiographical novel. Patricia White, Associate Editor of Under The Covers Book Reviews, declares the resulting book to be "an innovative, imaginative, and compassionate work that is more than just a novel or a memoir."

APOLLO opens a picture window on an 'emotionally challenged' family who are attempting to seize their own vision of the American dream in 1950s and 1960s Midwestern suburbia. J.D. is a new father -circa 1956- who finds himself driven to explore risky desires, and who guards a disturbing secret from his past. Marilyn, his wife, is placing her own wishes on indefinite hold in order to successfully keep her husband's aberrations at bay. She loses her foothold after suffering the outcome of a terrible loss.

The author's prose is, by turns, tight and shimmering. He gives us over to a world where fears of nuclear detonation alternate with the heady pleasures of mid-century American amusement parks, or Elvis on the jukes at the corner drug store. From the first Polaroid camera to the appearance of the Saturn V rocket, APOLLO traverses the frontiers of a pivotal generation of Americans. At heart this is a story that examines the bonds and barriers between father and son. It is a reading of what must happen when inexorable social pressures of an explosive era invade the presumed sanctity of the suburban family den. autobiographies, biographies, fiction, nonfiction, novellas, novels, narratives, American regional social histories, memoirs, Catholic childhoods, Midwestern childhoods