Progressive degeneration of a poor-white Georgia family living in a tumble-down shack on worn-out land that had once been a prosperous tobacco plantation.

Ambushed and left for dead, Confederate soldier Luke Jensen is taken in by a Georgia farmer and his beautiful daughter who nurse him back to health, but when fate takes a tragic turn, Luke, driven by vengeance, becomes the greatest bounty hunter who ever lived.

When a rising figure in the perfume and flavor industry samples a unique apple picked from the mountain orchards of a widowed single father, her ensuing search for the apple's origins brings her into the farmer's mysterious world.

It is 1917, in that sliver of border land that divides Georgia from Alabama. Dispossessed farmer Pearl Jewett ekes out a hardscrabble existence with his three young sons: Cane (the eldest; handsome; intelligent); Cob (short; heavy set; a bit slow); and Chimney (the youngest; thin; ill-tempered). Several hundred miles away in southern Ohio, a farmer by the name of Ellsworth Fiddler lives with his son, Eddie, and his wife, Eula. After Ellsworth is swindled...

"This memoir by Harry Crews captures the first six years of his life among impoverished tenant farmer families in rural southern Georgia. Crews shares details of farm life, his father's death, his friendship with the son of a Black hired hand; his bout with polio; his mother and stepfather's failing marriage; his near-fatal scalding at a hog-killing; and a five-month sojourn in Jacksonville, Florida. As an introduction to Crews's fiction, this portrait...