Born in Ngawi, East Java, in 1932, Umar Kayam obtained his masters degree from New York University and his doctoral degree from Cornell University. It was there, in New York, where he began to hone his literary skills. The publication of his first collection of short stories, A Thousand Fireflies in Manhattan, in 1972, gained him national fame as a short story writer.

The light and semi-ironic tone of Kayam's "New York stories," in which the author viewed an archetypal cast of New York characters through the lens of a nai ve Indonesian outsider vanished completely in the next phase of the...

"In my mind rose a misty picture of a little girl in a floral dress. As for her face: nothing. I could only hope that she had been pretty. I sat overcome. What a procession of developments in one day Only that morning I had left Madiun; at midday I was wobbling on a buggy past an ocean of rice fields; tonight, suddenly, I had been renamed by my parents and handed a wife."

Thus begins Sastrodarsono's life, returning to his village as a newly- appointed schoolteacher, and by virtue of that position, a member of the "priyayi" - functionary gentry awesomely elevated above the peasantry of...

From their origin in paddy mud during the final decades of the Dutch East Indies, to unimagined roles within the new structures of a modernising Indonesia, 'Gentry' is the saga of an extended Javanese family heroically pursuing its dream of betterment through a social leap. There was in that era at the start of this story a unique route by which an exceptionally determined peasant might attain the status of a 'priyayi'--a class of functionary gentry with a government salary, bureaucratic aristocrats with duties divorced from manual labour, bearers of noble principles of responsibility,...