Hilary Masters' memoir received rave reviews when it was first published in 1982.

	"Last Stands: Notes From Memory" By Hilary Masters Southern Methodist University Press ($15.95)

The Boston Globe called it "an American classic" that "belongs on everyone's bookshelf." Critic Jonathan Yardley pronounced it "a luminous, consequential book."

Publishers Weekly judged it "a quiet, evocative memoir that cuts back and forth through time, revealing the complexities and ambiguities of one family's life."

Now, after being out of print for several years, "Last Stands" has been reissued by SMU Press, with a new introduction by essayist Phillip Lopate and a new afterword by the author, who teaches English and creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University.

Lopate, an astute critic, writes that the book "holds up brilliantly" more than 20 years after it first appeared.

Unlike authors of many recent memoirs, Hilary Masters has both a fascinating story to tell and great skill as a writer.

The major characters are his father, Edgar Lee Masters, author of the poetry classic "Spoon River Anthology," his strong, opinionated mother and his maternal grandparents who helped rear him.

His father had been a law partner of Clarence Darrow in Chicago and part-time poet before he made a big splash with "Spoon River," a series of graveside monologues that captured small-town, Midwestern values.

By 1928, when Masters was born, his father was 60, out of favor in literary circles and becoming increasingly difficult to live with.

Masters was shipped off to Kansas City to live with his maternal grandparents while his parents stayed in New York at the Chelsea Hotel, bringing him back only during the summers.

Masters writes about those early years without resentment. His grandfather entertained him with thrilling stories of his days on the western frontier with the U.S. Cavalry and with accounts of his adventures as a soldier of fortune-turned-civil engineer in the jungles of Central and South America.

His grandmother, a warm, caring woman, lavished him with love and attention.

In the summers, staying with his parents in Manhattan, he spent happy days roller skating in Central Park and the Bronx Zoo -- even in the Museum of Natural History -- and riding the Seventh Avenue subway all day long for a nickel.

But his father, increasingly unable to find a market for his writing, was having serious financial and emotional problems.

The poet was also pained -- and irritated -- by his wife's decision to assert her independence by returning to school for a teaching certificate to help pay the bills. And he was feeling guilty about neglecting his son.

In a poignant letter to his 8-year-old son, reprinted in the book, the poet wrote:

"Perhaps, and this hurts, I should have given up writing, and devoted my time to you. That might have been a contribution to America better than I have made by isolating myself . . . "

Another letter several years later, when Hilary was at boarding school, was even more distressing. It was from the parents of a fellow student who entered Masters' dorm room with news that the poet, separated from his wife, had been found starving in his hotel room and was near death. The story had been in the New York newspapers.

As Masters discovered when he tracked down his father in the hospital, the story had been greatly exaggerated. But there was enough truth in it for Edna St. Vincent Millay to send a check for $50 and for H. L. Mencken, a longtime friend, to donate $100 to help pay the poet's overdue account at the Chelsea.

Miraculously, if we can judge by this wonderful book, Masters survived his traumatic childhood not only unscarred but with love and affection for the people who raised him.

His mother, who initially resisted the book's publication, is the one who held the family together and is the strongest person in the author's life.

These are people worth knowing, as Hilary Masters portrays them, and they come vividly to life in "Last Stands."