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This Article provides historical background of begrudging life during 1916

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This Article provides historical background of begrudging life during 1916

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Bad news: No antibiotics. Good news: Streetcars, everywhere!

The presidential campaign is replete with allusions to better times and eclipsed golden ages of American greatness. But in a new review from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the economist Carol Boyd Leon paints a sociological portrait of America as it was 100 years ago, when technology was meager, financial ruin was one downturn away, war was ongoing in Europe, and the choices that Americans have come to expect-in their cars, clothes, food, and homes-were preceded by a monotonous consumer economy. In 1915, Americans walked everywhere (or took a streetcar, if they lived in cities), lived in three-generation homes that they rarely owned, ate almost as much lard as chicken, and spent Friday nights dancing to player pianos. In short: Everything was worse, except for the commute.

Here is a closer look at America, one century ago.

America suffered worse working conditions, in just about every way.

For men: Work for men was more widespread, more dangerous, worse paid, and, well, just more annoying. According to the 1920 census, 85 percent of men over 14 were in the labor force, compared with just 69 percent for men over 16 today. It was the dawn of scientific management, with factory workers introduced to a brand new office colleague, the time clock. Manufacturing workers averaged 55 hours at work per week, 10 percent more than self-reported averages today. And the jobs were more dangerous: With a fatality rate of 61 deaths per 100,000 workers, the workplace was about 30 times more dangerous than it is today.

For women: Women were much less likely to work, and in 1915, many were finding employment at elementary and high schools. The reason for women's early entry into education in the U.S., however, is a little depressing. School boards preferred female teachers not only because they were seen as more loving, but also because they would do what male principals told them while accepting less than a man's wage.

In 1938 a writer with the American Association for Old-Age Security For the elderly: For those who did make it to old age (something of a feat back then), Social Security didn't exist, and in bad times, poverty among the old was so bad that contemporaries wrote of growing old as if it were a dystopia-the "haunting fear in the winter of life." said "our modern system of industrial production has rendered our lives insecure to the point of despair." The industrializing economy was no country for old men or women. As families moved off farms into cities and suburbs, it became harder for some old people to find work in factories, which ran on limber sinews and sweat. In the 40 years before 1920, the share of men over 65 working on farms dropped 39 percent.

America ate lard and cold cereal and paid a lot of money for it.

It's hard to imagine many Americans begging to switch places with a 1915 gourmand. Food was not only less varied in 1915, but also considerably more expensive. The typical American spent one-third of his income on food 100 years ago, which is twice today's share.

The early 20th century was a golden age of cold-cereal products-Corn Flakes, Quaker Puffed Rice and Puffed Wheat, and Shredded Wheat all came on the market between 1906 and 1912-but on the farm, people enjoyed a heartier meal of eggs and pancakes. Lunch at the office provided a logistical challenge, as in 1915, there existed no such thing as a plastic bag to keep a sandwich fresh. Instead, contemporary cookbooks called for keeping sandwiches moist by "wrapping [them] in a dry towel, covered with a towel wrung out of hot water."

The average American ate roughly equivalent amounts of lard and chicken-11.5 pounds and 14 pounds, respectively, per year. One century later, the ratio has, blessedly, widened. Americans eat 57 pounds of chicken, compared to just 1.5 pounds of lard. But Americans, gluttons to their core, have replaced fat's flavor with something even worse: Their sugar intake has jumped from 88 to 130 pounds in the last 100 years.

American home life was extremely crowded.

"The business of America is farming business," one might have said in 1915, but industrialization was slowly removing the "farming" part. America had one-third of its current population in 1915, and it was considerably more spread out. Half of all families lived in rural areas, or in towns with populations below 2,500.

But you wouldn't notice the relative sparseness if you just just stayed home. The average household was crowded, with more than four people, a figure which has fallen with each passing decade, and now resides just above 2.5 people. Loneliness was a financial impossibility, back then, as few could afford to live alone. Children remained under their parents' roofs until they were married (at an average age of 21, for women). Practically no couples got divorced, and widows moved in with their adult children.

Owning was a rarity. In 1920, there were about four times as many renters as homeowners, whereas today, the homeownership rate is above 60 percent. Houses were cheaper, but buying was a relative hassle: Although the average value of a home was no more than $75,000 in today's dollars, mortgages typically required a downpayment of about 50 percent.

Infants were both more abundant and more precarious. Women had more children-three, on average-to help on the farm in the old agrarian economy. But the more disquieting reason women had so many children was that children were likely to die: Ten percent of infants died in their first year, compared with one in every 168 births in the U.S. today. For this happy and dramatic improvement, mothers and fathers can thank the professionalization of baby-delivery. Giving birth at home in 1915 wasn't merely normal; it was ubiquitous. In a major city like Pittsburgh, 87 percent of births happened outside of hospitals.

America was a younger country, but had no concept of "teen-agers."

In 1915, 100 million people lived in the United States, and more than half were under 25. One century later, the population is more than 300 million, but the share of people under age 25 has fallen to one-third. Meanwhile the share of people over 65 tripled, from 5 percent to 14 percent.

But in the early 20th century, the word "teen-ager" either didn't exist or was scarcely used outside of development psychology. Since the term applies to a group of youngish people who hang out together, their invention required an insulated environment where teens could behave, well, teenagery. Teens didn't create "high school." High schools created "teenagers."

As the U.S. economy shifted from a disparate agrarian society to a mass production machine, families relocated closer to cities and, at least initially, many sent their children to work. The movement to prevent kids from being forced to toil in mills encouraged compulsory education for teenagers. In 1920, just 28 percent of American youths between the ages of fourteen and seventeen were in high school. By 1930, 47 percent of this age group was attending high school. As young people spent more time in school, they developed their own customs in an environment away from work and family, and the possibility of a distinct teenage subculture became possible. It's hard to imagine a teenage culture in an economy where every 16-year-old is expected to work with his father on the lathe, or in the fields.

The second key development in the creation of the teenager was the invention of cars. It might be a horrifying consideration for today's singles, but a first date once meant an introductory chat in the living room with a girl's parents. This might have been followed by a deliciously awkward family dinner.

But cars emancipated romance from the stilted small talk of the family parlor. Just about everything a modern single person considers to be a "date" was made possible, or permissible, but the invention and normalization of car-driven romance. (If you think Tinder and dating apps are destroying romance today, you would have hated cars in the 1930s.) The fear that young men and fast cars were upending romantic norms was widespread. The chorus of the 1909 Cole Porter song "Keep Away From the Fellow Who Owns an Automobile" is instructive:

Keep away from the fellow who owns an automobile

He'll take you far in his motor car

Too darn far from your Pa and Ma

If his forty horsepower goes sixty miles an hour say

Goodbye forever, goodbye forever

Americans didn't drive: They walked, rode horses, and acrobatically dodged trolleys.

In the last 100 years, perhaps nothing about daily life has changed more than the commute.

Half of all families lived on farms in 1915, which means work was typically a walk away. Many city-dwellers also lived close enough to factories to arrive at the office on foot. Others went by horseback. In lieu of parallel parking spots along Main Street, there were hitching rails up and down central boulevards, where one might park a mule.

Horse use was peaking. The number of horses and mules on U.S. farms reached its all-century high around 1915, as tractors gradually replaced them. Streetcars were peaking, too, although their legacy would live on in surprising vestiges. My favorite anecdote in Carol Boyd Leon's remarkable essay concerns the origin of the Los Angeles Dodgers' name:

The Brooklyn Grays baseball team, nicknamed the Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers in 1895 and later the Brooklyn Dodgers, was so named "in tribute to their fans, who had to avoid speeding [trolley] cars in the maze of trolley lines crisscrossing the city.")

One thing that wasn't peaking was cars. There were just 2 million cars on the sparse roads of 1915, or about one for every 50 people. The Model T was a hot commodity, but outside of a handful of cities, there weren't many places you could easily drive it. Today, after several decades of car-friendly policies and public construction, there are more than 255 million registered vehicles in the United States. The number of vehicles has grown by 100 times in 100 years, conveniently for memory's sake.

America danced to phonographs in blue serge suits and long skirts.

Globalization has dramatically brought down the cost of clothing in the last few decades. But before the United States exported its textiles to Asia and Mexico, Americans paid handsomely for handsome American apparel. Now just 3 percent of a typical consumer's budget, clothing demanded 13 percent of one's income in 1915.

Even those sick with nostalgia for debonair hats and gloves must acknowledge that the era's style was monotonous. Men uniformly wore blue serge suits at work. Women wore skirts whose length varied, according to the fashion and the amount of material available for apparel manufacturers (since some was conserved for the war).

There were all sorts of tech amenities that might seem quotidian today that were rarities in 1915. Thirty percent of the country had a telephone. Less than 20 percent had a stove. Very few people owned a refrigerator, and almost nobody owned a radio. Within 60 years, clothes washers, dryers, air-conditioning, and television sets would all be household staples, but in 1915 they were nowhere to be seen. Instead, the most popular media product of the time might have been the player pianos or the phonograph.

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Long Hours, Crowded Houses, Death by Trolley: America in 1915

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Bad news: No antibiotics. Good news: Streetcars, everywhere! The presidential campaign is replete with allusions to better times and eclipsed golden ages of American greatness.

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"The Road Not Taken" was written during the middle of World War I.

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"The Road Not Taken" was written during the middle of World War I.

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https://www.google.com/search?q=When+was+world+war+1&rlz=1C1OPRA_enUS573US588&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjD7JCl0s_TAhXMx4MKHUiPD2IQ_AUICygC&biw=1280&bih=845#imgrc=fC624r7nPotLoM:

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A Critical Analysis of "The Road Not Taken" by John Greene

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A Critical Analysis of "The Road Not Taken" by John Greene

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In which Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken" sends John down the wrong edge of the river, which then leads to a consideration of the poem, Frost's inspiration Edward Thomas, making choices, and how/whether literature can actually matter. ---- Subscribe to our newsletter!

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Critical Context: "What Gives Robert Frost’s 'The Road Not Taken' Its Power?" written by David C. Ward

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Critical Context: "What Gives Robert Frost’s 'The Road Not Taken' Its Power?" written by David C. Ward

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Frost’s gently presented point is not just that we are self-reliant or independent, but truly alone in the world. No one has cut a path through the woods. We are following no one. We have to choose, and most terrifyingly, the choice may not actually matter. One way is as good as the other and while we can console ourselves with wishful thinking the poet knows that there’s no turning back to start over.

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This Video explains the details behind the 1916 election and the going-ons of the time

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This Video explains the details behind the 1916 election and the going-ons of the time

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The American Presidential Election of 1916

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Critical Context: "The Road Not Taken: The Poem Everyone Loves and Everyone Gets Wrong" written by David Orr

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Critical Context: "The Road Not Taken: The Poem Everyone Loves and Everyone Gets Wrong" written by David Orr

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Edward Thomas was one of the keenest literary thinkers of his time, and the poem was meant to capture aspects of his own personality and past. Yet even Thomas needed explicit instructions—indeed, six entire letters—in order to appreciate the series of double games played in “The Road Not Taken.” That misperception galled Frost.

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From The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong, a new book by David Orr.

A young man hiking through a forest is abruptly confronted with a fork in the path. He pauses, his hands in his pockets, and looks back and forth between his options. As he hesitates, images from possible futures flicker past: the young man wading into the ocean, hitchhiking, riding a bus, kissing a beautiful woman, working, laughing, eating, running, weeping. The series resolves at last into a view of a different young man, with his thumb out on the side of a road. As a car slows to pick him up, we realize the driver is the original man from the crossroads, only now he's accompanied by a lovely woman and a child. The man smiles slightly, as if confident in the life he's chosen and happy to lend that confidence to a fellow traveler. As the car pulls away and the screen is lit with gold-for it's a commercial we've been watching-the emblem of the Ford Motor Company briefly appears.

The advertisement I've just described ran in New Zealand in 2008. And it is, in most respects, a normal piece of smartly assembled and quietly manipulative product promotion. But there is one very unusual aspect to this commercial. Here is what is read by a voice-over artist, in the distinctive vowels of New Zealand, as the young man ponders his choice:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

It is, of course, "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost. In the commercial, this fact is never announced; the audience is expected to recognize the poem unaided. For any mass audience to recognize any poem is (to put it mildly) unusual. For an audience of car buyers in New Zealand to recognize a hundred-year-old poem from a country eight thousand miles away is something else entirely.
Looking for something else to read? How about ...
- Robert's Frost's Writers at Work interview
- Lucy Scholes's column about forgotten books
- A short story by Anthony Veasna So

But this isn't just any poem. It's "The Road Not Taken," and it plays a unique role not simply in American literature, but in American culture -and in world culture as well. Its signature phrases have become so ubiquitous, so much a part of everything from coffee mugs to refrigerator magnets to graduation speeches, that it's almost possible to forget the poem is actually a poem. In addition to the Ford commercial, "The Road Not Taken" has been used in advertisements for Mentos, Nicorette, the multibillion-dollar insurance company AIG, and the job-search Web site Monster.com, which deployed the poem during Super Bowl XXXIV to great success. Its lines have been borrowed by musical performers including (among many others) Bruce Hornsby, Melissa Etheridge, George Strait, and Talib Kweli, and it's provided episode titles for more than a dozen television series, including Taxi, The T w i l i g h t Zone, and B a t t le s t a r Galactica, as well as lending its name to at least one video game, Spry Fox's Road Not Taken ("a rogue-like puzzle game about surviving life's surprises"). As one might expect, the influence of "The Road Not Taken" is even greater on journalists and authors. Over the past thirty-five years alone, language from Frost's poem has appeared in nearly two thousand news stories worldwide, which yields a rate of more than once a week. In addition, "The Road Not Taken" appears as a title, subtitle, or chapter heading in more than four hundred books by authors other than Robert Frost, on subjects ranging from political theory to the impending zombie apocalypse. At least one of these was a massive international best seller: M. Scott Peck's self-help book The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth, which was originally published in 1978 and has sold more than seven million copies in the United States and Canada.

Given the pervasiveness of Frost's lines, it should come as no surprise that the popularity of "The Road Not Taken" appears to exceed that of every other major twentieth-century American poem, including those often considered more central to the modern (and modernist) era. Admittedly, the popularity of poetry is difficult to judge. Poems that are attractive to educators may not be popular with readers, so the appearance of a given poem in anthologies and on syllabi doesn't necessarily reveal much. And book sales indicate more about the popularity of a particular poet than of any individual poem. But there are at least two reasons to think that "The Road Not Taken" is the most widely read and recalled American poem of the past century (and perhaps the adjective "American" could be discarded). The first is the Favorite Poem Project, which was devised by former poet laureate Robert Pinsky. Pinsky used his public role to ask Americans to submit their favorite poem in various forms; the clear favorite among more than eighteen thousand entries was "The Road Not Taken."

The second, more persuasive reason comes from Google. Until it was discontinued in late 2012, a tool called Google Insights for Search allowed anyone to see how frequently certain expressions were being searched by users worldwide over time and to compare expressions to one another. Google normalized the data to account for regional differences in population, converted it to a scale of one to one hundred, and displayed the results so that the relative differences in search volume would be obvious. Here is the result that Google provided when "The Road Not Taken" and "Frost" were compared with several of the best-known modern poems and their authors, all of which are often taught alongside Frost's work in college courses on American poetry of the first half of the twentieth century:

SEARCH TERMS | SCALED WORLDWIDE SEARCH VOLUME

"Road Not Taken" + "Frost"

48

"Waste Land" + "Eliot"

12

"Prufrock " + "Eliot"

12

"This Is Just to Say" + "Carlos Williams"

4

"Station of the Metro" + "Pound"

2

According to Google, then, "The Road Not Taken" was, as of mid-2012, at least four times as searched as the central text of the modernist era- The Waste Land -and at least twenty-four times as searched as the most anthologized poem by Ezra Pound. By comparison, this is even greater than the margin by which the term "college football " beats "archery" and "water polo." Given Frost's typically prickly relationships with almost all of his peers (he once described Ezra Pound as trying to become original by "imitating somebody that hasn't been imitated recently"), one can only imagine the pleasure this news would have brought him.

But as everyone knows, poetry itself isn't especially widely read, so perhaps being the most popular poem is like being the most widely requested salad at a steak house. How did "The Road Not Taken" fare against slightly tougher competition? Better than you might think:

SEARCH TERMS | SCALED WORLDWIDE SEARCH VOLUME

"Road Not Taken" + "Frost"

47

"Like a Rolling Stone" + "Dylan"

19

"Great Gatsby " + "Fitzgerald"

17

"Death of a Salesman" + "Miller"

14

"Psycho" + "Hitchcock"

14

The results here are even more impressive when you consider that "The Road Not Taken" is routinely misidentified as "The Road Less Traveled," thereby reducing the search volume under the poem's actual title. (For instance, a search for "Frost's poem the road less traveled" produces more than two hundred thousand results, none of which would have been counted above.) Frost once claimed his goal as a poet was "to lodge a few poems where they will be hard to get rid of "; with "The Road Not Taken," he appears to have lodged his lines in granite. On a word-for-word basis, it may be the most popular piece of literature ever written by an American.

*

And almost everyone gets it wrong. This is the most remarkable thing about "The Road Not Taken"-not its immense popularity (which is remarkable enough), but the fact that it is popular for what seem to be the wrong reasons. It's worth pausing here to underscore a truth so obvious that it is often taken for granted: Most widely celebrated artistic projects are known for being essentially what they purport to be. When we play "White Christmas" in December, we correctly assume that it's a song about memory and longing centered around the image of snow falling at Christmas. When we read Joyce's Ulysses, we correctly assume that it's a complex story about a journey around Dublin as filtered through many voices and styles. A cultural offering may be simple or complex, cooked or raw, but its audience nearly always knows what kind of dish is being served.

Frost's poem turns this expectation on its head. Most readers consider "The Road Not Taken" to be a paean to triumphant self-assertion ("I took the one less traveled by"), but the literal meaning of the poem's own lines seems completely at odds with this interpretation. The poem's speaker tells us he "shall be telling," at some point in the future, of how he took the road less traveled by, yet he has already admitted that the two paths "equally lay / In leaves" and "the passing there / Had worn them really about the same." So the road he will later call less traveled is actually the road equally traveled. The two roads are interchangeable.

According to this reading, then, the speaker will be claiming "ages and ages hence" that his decision made "all the difference" only because this is the kind of claim we make when we want to comfort or blame ourselves by assuming that our current position is the product of our own choices (as opposed to what was chosen for us or allotted to us by chance). The poem isn't a salute to can-do individualism; it's a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives. "The Road Not Taken" may be, as the critic Frank Lentricchia memorably put it, "the best example in all of American poetry of a wolf in sheep's clothing." But we could go further: It may be the best example in all of American culture of a wolf in sheep's clothing.

In this it strongly resembles its creator. Frost is the only major literary figure in American history with two distinct audiences, one of which regularly assumes that the other has been deceived. The first audience is relatively small and consists of poetry devotees, most of whom inhabit the art form's academic subculture. For these readers, Frost is a mainstay of syllabi and seminars, and a regular subject of scholarly articles (though he falls well short of inspiring the interest that Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens enjoy). He's considered bleak, dark, complex, and manipulative; a genuine poet's poet, not a historical artifact like Longfellow or a folk balladeer like Carl Sandburg. While Frost isn't the most esteemed of the early twentieth-century poets, very few dedicated poetry readers talk about him as if he wrote greeting card verse.

Then there is the other audience. This is the great mass of readers at all age levels who can conjure a few lines of "The Road Not Taken" and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," and possibly "Mending Wall " or "Birches," and who think of Frost as quintessentially American in the way that "amber waves of grain" are quintessentially American. To these readers (or so the first audience often assumes), he isn't bleak or sardonic but rather a symbol of Yankee stoicism and countrified wisdom. This audience is large. Indeed, the search patterns of Google users indicate that, in terms of popularity, Frost's true peers aren't Pound or Stevens or Eliot, but rather figures like Pablo Picasso and Winston Churchill. Frost is not simply that rare bird, a popular poet; he is one of the best-known personages of the past hundred years in any cultural arena. In all of American history, the only writers who can match or surpass him are Mark Twain and Edgar Allan Poe, and the only poet in the history of English-language verse who commands more attention is William Shakespeare.

This level of recognition makes poetry readers uncomfortable. Poets, we assume, are not popular-at least after 1910 or so. If one becomes popular, then either he must be a second-tier talent catering to mass taste (as Sandburg is often thought to be) or there must be some kind of confusion or deception going on. The latter explanation is generally applied to Frost's celebrity. As Robert Lowell once put it, "Robert Frost at midnight, the audience gone / to vapor, the great act laid on the shelf in mothballs." The "great act" is for "the audience" of ordinary readers, but his true admirers know better. He is really a wolf, we say, and it is only the sheep who are fooled. It's an explanation that Frost himself sometimes encouraged, much as he used to boast about the trickiness of "The Road Not Taken" in private correspondence. ("I'll bet not half a dozen people can tell who was hit and where he was hit by my Road Not Taken," he wrote to his friend Louis Untermeyer.) In this sense, the poem is emblematic. Just as millions of people know its language about the road "less traveled" without understanding what that language is actually saying, millions of people recognize its author without understanding what that author was actually doing.

But is this view of "The Road Not Taken" and its creator entirely accurate? Poems, after all, aren't arguments-they are to be interpreted, not proven, and that process of interpretation admits a range of possibilities, some supported by diction, some by tone, some by quirks of form and structure. Certainly it's wrong to say that "The Road Not Taken" is a straightforward and sentimental celebration of individualism: this interpretation is contradicted by the poem's own lines. Yet it's also not quite right to say that the poem is merely a knowing literary joke disguised as shopworn magazine verse that has somehow managed to fool millions of readers for a hundred years. A role too artfully assumed ceases to become a role and instead becomes a species of identity-an observation equally true of Robert Frost himself. One of Frost's greatest advocates, the scholar Richard Poirier, has written with regard to Frost's recognition among ordinary readers that "there is no point trying to explain the popularity away, as if it were a misconception prompted by a pose." By the same token, there is no point in trying to explain away the general misreadings of "The Road Not Taken," as if they were a mistake encouraged by a fraud. The poem both is and isn't about individualism, and it both is and isn't about rationalization. It isn't a wolf in sheep's clothing so much as a wolf that is somehow also a sheep, or a sheep that is also a wolf. It is a poem about the necessity of choosing that somehow, like its author, never makes a choice itself-that instead repeatedly returns us to the same enigmatic, leaf-shadowed crossroads.
From The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong by David Orr. Reprinted by arrangement with The Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2015 by David Orr.
David Orr is the poetry columnist for the New York Times Book Review. He is the winner of the Nona Balakian Prize from the National Book Critics Circle, and his writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Slate, and The Yale Review.

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David Orr on the popular misconceptions surrounding the iconic poem.

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The Road Not Taken Criticism by Mark Richardson | Modern American Poetry

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In the second criticism I chose, Mark Richardson interprets "The Road Not Taken" as a poem that means that we are always so tied up in things that we often think that decisions are temporary and insignificant, when in reality these decisions are what lead us to our final destination.

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"An admirer of Robert E. Lee, William named his son for the Confederate general." Robert frost was named after Robert E. Lee.

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"An admirer of Robert E. Lee, William named his son for the Confederate general." Robert frost was named after Robert E. Lee.

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By Bailey, Ellen

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Robert Frost spoke at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy

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Robert Frost spoke at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy

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January 20, 1961 - Poet Robert Frost at President John F. Kennedy's Inauguration

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Robert Lee Frost (1874 - 1963) - Find A Grave Memorial

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Robert Frost lived on a farm for a large portion of his life

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Robert Frost lived on a farm for a large portion of his life

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