This Crooked Way

A classic novel of one man's will and the undercurrent of violence in the Mississippi Delta Elizabeth Spencer presents a vital, moving story set in the deep South--the Delta and Mississippi hill country. Amos Dudley was a farm boy in the Delta in the 1900s until he started working for his brother Ephraim in the store by the railroad. It was an ordinary environ in which to discover the strange forces that move a man to set his course in the world. But the forces working within Amos were by no means ordinary. Sometimes cruel, sometimes suddenly tender, they were strong and willful, so that Amos became a man to reckon with--to Ary, his beautiful, plantation-born wife; to the woman in the bayou; to the shiftless philosopher, Arney. Even the rich, black swamp soil which he wrested from the forest and gave to his cotton seemed to respond with awe and eagerness to Amos's will. His sensuous, wayward daughter and the man she loved especially felt the full shattering drama of the violence that had evidently been building in the heart of a man who was determined to take his own crooked way. Elizabeth Spencer is the author of nine novels, seven collections of short stories, a memoir, and a play. Her novella The Light in the Piazza (1960) was adapted for the screen in 1962 and transformed into a Tony-winning broadway musical of the same name in 2005. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.