aul Landry Monette was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, October 16, 1945. This makes him (just barely) a baby boomer, born after the conclusion of World War II. Had he lived, he would have been sixty years old this year. His father, Paul Louis Monette (b.1923) was of French-Canadian descent from Methuen, Massachusetts. After service in the war as a navigator with flights over Japan, he first drove a truck for a coal company. He rose to an office job, and the family moved to Andover. His mother was Jacqueline (née Morin) Monette (1923-1990). He had one younger sibling, Robert Lamb Monette, born November 6, 1951.

His parents are shown here in handsome studio portraits. His grandmother, "Nana" Lamb, and his brother are shown in a snapshot posed with the boys' dog, Skipper. Monette and his father are shown in a small boat on a lake in an idyllic eastern setting.

Paul Monette did well in school, receiving nothing but praise on his report cards. One is said to have noted: "Paul is perfect." One on display here records, among his straight A's, that he was "a gentleman at all times." He earned a scholarship to Phillips Academy, Andover, as a "town" student, graduating 1963, and earned a scholarship to Yale University, majoring in English literature, graduating 1967. He was involved in numerous societies at Yale, and newspaper clippings show his achievements: Yale Dean's List Students, Monette Wins Yale Poetry Honor, Teaching Fellowship at Yale, Yale Graduate Will Study at Oxford. He was the entrepreneur of various literary and arts events and for an arts festival received a letter of commendation from Lady Bird Johnson in 1966.

The summer of his junior year he spent in England and other parts of western Europe, ostensibly to study the works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. His letters home are exuberant in describing new places and adventures and brash when talking about his writing: "I sat on the beach all morning . & finished the first chapter of the novel I will never finish." In London, he saw Noël Coward in his "A Song at Twilight," one play in which the gay playwright treated a gay subject openly.

Monette did write his senior paper in English about Tennyson's "In Memoriam," a sonnet sequence to his deceased friend, Arthur Henry Hallam. The paper was supervised by noted critic and professor Harold Bloom and contained statements which were prescient to the concerns of Monette's later life and poetry: "The speaker still feels a sense of injustice that Hallam was taken. The conflict between grief and the old impulse to move on has not been resolved.." This would be exactly Monette's situation as a writer years later.

Monette's last college years and graduation came at the height of the U.S. draft for Vietnam, which Monette addressed in a 1968 essay for the Yale Alumni Magazine. In letters home from Europe, he had written that he was asked about Vietnam but didn't know much about it. In the article he quotes the French writer, Bernard Fall, at that time about the most reliable source for an understanding of what had happened since the French left the country. Monette concludes that his "personal course of action is finally vague and selfish" as he weighs alternatives—as did others—of going to Officer Candidate School or prison.

After graduation, he taught English in private schools, Cheshire Academy, Milton Academy, and Pine Manor College. In the 1970 Cheshire yearbook he is shown gesticulating expansively as he teaches about the contemporary novelist John Updike. He published a farewell poem to his students:

Paul Monette's father

Paul Monette's mother

Paul Monette and his father

Monette's first grade report card

Family snapshot

Yale graduation, 1967

Monette's Yale activities

Trip to England and Europe

Monette's Yale senior thesis