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T R E
E S O F H E
A V E N
E. P. Dutton & Co., New York City,
New York, 1940. 340 pp.
With decorations by Woodi Ishmael
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Jesse Stuart made a couple of attempts
to write his first published novel, Trees of Heaven,
before he succeeded: “It was the third
time I'd tried to write this book but
now words came to me. This novel was in
my head. It fell onto the paper as fast
as I use my typewriter” (Richardson,
Jesse, 282-283). He finished
the 143,000-word manuscript in 75 days. The story
centers around two men, old Anse Bushman
and Boliver Tussie, both of whom desired to own the same piece of land,
the Sexton
Land Tract, where some of Tussie’s
kin-folk were buried in a small family
plot beneath a beautiful stand of trees. The two
men were at loggerheads over the land, and then Anse’s
son and Tussie’s daughter fell in
love...
Author
Wade Hall, in the forward to the second
edition published in 1980 (copy in the
Jesse Stuart Collection), wrote that Jesse’s first novel
was written with a “spare, sinewy prose
that can be as direct as a twelve-gage
shot gun or as lyrical as August corn
tassels blowing in the warm wind”
(page 10). |
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