Star-Crossed Lovers

From Lowney Handy's scandalous small-town open marriage to author James Jones's extraordinary apprenticeship with Maxwell Perkins, Star-Crossed Lovers illuminates an unforgettable love story. She was an eccentric small-town self-taught rebel, driven by creative zeal and a non-conformist streak. He was a distressed ex-GI (flat broke, without prospects, damaged by war), 17 years younger than she, consumed by visions of a writer's life. Advocating for Jones's "medical discharge" from the Army in the summer of 1944, Lowney and her husband invited Jones to live and write at their home in Robinson, Illinois. After years of struggle, Jones's From Here to Eternity won the National Book Award and profoundly transformed American literature. The 1953 film adaptation swept the Academy Awards in 1954. Expanding their shared vision of life, the Handys and Jones incorporated a unique writers' colony in 1951 that was funded mostly by Jones's Eternity royalties. This is their odyssey of love, passion, and conflict, which remains exceptional in literary history. "Fascinating story-kept my interest throughout." -OLIVER STONE, Academy Award-winning writer/director " ... The downright surreal story of James Jones and Lowney Handy, and what they accomplished." -ERICA HELLER, author of Yossarian Slept Here and One Last Lunch "Oh, to be young and a writer and finding your way with an exotic older woman! M. J. Moore's Star-Crossed Lovers is an incredible tale...Indispensable!" -LUCIAN K. TRUSCOTT IV, author of Dress Gray, Heart of War, and other novels; Village Voice staff writer; West Point graduate "In today's age of flimsy comic-book characters passing for superheroes, it is life-affirming-hell, it's vital-to recall the red-blooded humanity James Jones poured into his 1951 National Book Award-winning From Here to Eternity. At its core is an iconoclastic love story...all of which Moore soundly spells out in engaging and impressively researched detail." -STEPHEN M. SILVERMAN, author of The Catskills: Its History and How It Changed America; and Dancing on the Ceiling: Stanley Donen and His Movies