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9780807845950 Academic Inspection Copy

The Bitterweed Path

A Rediscovered Novel
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This long out-of-print and newly rediscovered novel tells the story of two boys growing up in the cotton country of Mississippi a generation after the Civil War. Originally published in 1950, the novel's unique contribution lies in its subtle engagement of homosexuality and cross-class love. In The Bitterweed Path , Thomas Hal Phillips vividly recreates rural Mississippi at the turn of the century. In elegant prose, he draws on the Old Testament story of David and Jonathan and writes of the friendship and love between two boys--one a sharecropper's son and the other the son of the landlord--and the complications that arise when the father of one of the boys falls in love with his son's friend. Part of a very small body of gay literature of the period, The Bitterweed Path does not sensationalize homosexual love but instead portrays sexuality as a continuum of human behavior. The result is a book that challenges many assumptions about gay representation in the first half of the twentieth century.
Thomas Hal Phillips, a former Hollywood screenwriter and consultant whose film work includes Nashville, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Ode to Billy Joe, and Walking Tall II, now lives in his native Mississippi. He is author of the novels The Golden Lie, Search for a Hero, Kangaroo Hollow, and The Loved and the Unloved.
"Phillips's readable style and his ability to create a feeling of ever-growing tension will hold the reader from beginning to end."--Library Journal "This book is a delicate, sensitive work, written in a warm, quiet rhythm which creates and maintains a mood and an atmosphere proper to the story's locale and period. . . . Phillips has made the action of his story flow as effortlessly as time itself; he has brought [Southern rural] life during the early years of the century into the sort of believable reality which other Southern writers carefully avoid."--New York Times Book Review
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