Writes of Passage captures the essence of a universal human experience in literature that has enticed generations of readers: that moment in both fictional and real life when innocence and naiveté evolve into an understanding of the world's greater moral complexity. Collected from the last twenty-five years of The Hudson Review, the stories and memoirs in this book, by both emerging writers and established storytellers like Elizabeth Spencer, William Trevor, and Tennessee Williams, were first published in the literary quarterly based on their own merits, without regard to a developing genre. The editors of The Hudson Review became aware of a unifying theme through the magazine's Writers in the Schools program, which brought many of these works to students in two Harlem high schools.