Arthur Sharenow
The Summer Camp Uprising
( Novel, available now from in paperback via Amazon )
37 Summers: My Years as a Camp Director
( Autobiography, available now in paperback and Kindle ebook )
Arthur Sharenow spent sixty summers of his life in camp. He started as a camper at a very young age and continued on in camp until his retirement. He experienced every aspect of camp life, from camper to counselor, to Unit Leader, to Head Counselor, and finally to owner/director. After selling the camp to one of his former outstanding long- term camper-counselors, he stayed on for an additional eight summers so he could continue to enjoy the sheer joy of being at camp, a place always alive with the excitement of childhood and youth.
“I loved being a camp director. How many people are ever given the opportunity to try to create a perfect world. We Camp Directors have that opportunity every summer. A perfect world for our campers was always my goal. Many summers we came very close. Other years we fell somewhat short. The summers that stand out in my mind as most collectively challenging were the last three summers of the 1960s, where the national turmoil associated with the Vietnam War spilled over into summer camps. Happily, the mood of the country changed in the following years, and we experienced decades of wonderful camp seasons.
After my retirement from summer camping, two new interests became prominent in my life. I took a number of writing courses, several of which were writing memoirs. Many of my memoirs turned out to be camp stories. My writing instructor encouraged me to turn those stories into a book, which I did. 37 Summers is a collection of memoirs, all from the pages of my camp memory. My current book, The Summer Camp Uprising is a novel and comes from the same memory source, but is entirely fictional.
My second new area of concentration was photography, re-awakening an interest from my early teen years. I worked hard at photography, learning and doing. Eventually I started exhibiting and selling the photos I considered my best. Along the way I started teaching photography, and have been doing so over the past dozen years. What I like most about teaching photo classes is that it reminds me of coaching kids in softball and baseball, something I loved doing all of my adult years at camp.”