Sinners, Come Away

Boston: Little, Brown and Company. Near Fine in Good dj. 1949. First Edition. Hardcover. [nice solid copy, light shelfwear, minor smudging to page edges; jacket edgeworn, very slight paper loss at several corners, a couple of closed tears with associated creasing]. A "two-fisted story of men in jail," set in Alabama, with a jacket blurb by none other than Arthur Miller, who calls it "very beautiful: one of the few novels whose people live a life of their own." A contemporary reviewer singled out the author's "meticulous ear for dialogue." The central character is named Presley Cargile, and sounds like a prototype for the young rebels of the 1950s: "Illiterate, handsome and violent, Presley made his own rules for living in a society whose tenets he could not read and would not understand." The author, son of the popular novelist Harry Leon Wilson (a fact which goes unremarked upon; there is no biographical jacket blurb at all, in fact), wrote only two more books, well-regarded juvenile novels about a 10-year-old boy in the Tennessee mountains. .