Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin (1965)

First Edition. Signed.

Near fine cloth boards in very good dust jacket with mild edge wear. No previous owner markings and not price clipped. First book.

Toussaint Boudreaux, a black docker in New Orleans, puts up with his co-workers' racism because he has to, and moonlights as a prize-fighter in the hope of a better life-but the only break he gets lands him in penal servitude. J.P. Winfield, a hick with a gift for twelve-string guitar, finds his break into show-biz leads to the flipside of the American dream. Avery Broussard, descendant of an aristocratic French family, runs whiskey when what remains of his land is repossessed...

The interlocking stories of these three men are an elegy to the realities of life in 1950s Louisiana, their destinies fixed by the circumstances of their birth and time. Yet each carries the hope of redemption...