Michael Pearson

With the death of his mother and the sudden disappearance of his father, teenager Tommy Blanks is left to live alone in the Bronx on the money his father left him and what he can steal. His shoplifting eventually lands him in Upstate New York in a Catholic Boys' Home run by a demonic priest. There Tommy falls in love with a local girl, Nada, but also meets his nemesis, Adam Delano. After a school-wide brawl, Tommy escapes and is presumed dead by the local authorities when they find his hat floating in the river. Tommy is taken in by a local hermit, a Korean war veteran, who leads him to Tommy's great-great grandfather's deserted house in a nearby town. History and fiction converge with the discovery that Thomas BlankenshipTommy's great-great grandfatheris the young man whom Mark Twain used as the prototype for Huckleberry Finn. And Tommy's life on the road as an orphan parallels Twain's resourceful Huck Finn. Eventually, his search for the facts and the meaning of his own experience leads Tommy to Chicago, the Southwest, San Francisco, and finally back home to Shohola Falls. Pearson's evocative prose works to dramatic effect in a novel that is part mystery, part bildungsroman, part love story. The book will appeal to a general audience and especially aficionados of Twain.

Michael Pearson here writes about his travels to American places of literary import, including: William Faulkner's Mississippi; Ernest Hemingway's Key West; John Steinbeck's California; Mark Twain's Missouri; and Flannery O'Connor's Georgia.

Using firsthand accounts,journals, letters from British officers in the field, reports from colonial governors in the colonies,Michael Pearson has provided a contemporary report of the Revolution as the British witnessed it. Seen from this perspective, some of the major events of the war are given startling interpretations: For example, the British considered their defeat at Bunker Hill nothing more than a minor setback, especially in light of their capture of New York and Philadelphia. Only at the very end of the conflict did they realize that the Yankees had lost the battles but won the war. From the Boston Tea Party to that day in 1785 when the first U.S. ambassador presented his credentials to a grudging George III, here is the full account of "those damned rebels" who somehow managed to found a new nation.

In this memoir, Pearson renders time and place vividly through lyrical narrative and generous spirit towards his characters, juxtaposing descriptions of adolescent escapades with the grim discipline of parochial schools. In this Bronx is where dreams of escape fuse with bittersweet memories.