None Buth The Living - Paperback

by Kenneth P. Smith (Author)

Ezra Burke, like his tenant-farmer father before him, struggles to eke out a living

from a rented plot of depleted, rocky soil in his beloved Blue Ridge Mountains.

With crops destroyed by a freakish summer storm and hopelessly in debt, he is

forced into the employ of the wicked and cunning landowner. When further tragedy

strikes, Ezra, still a young, but now a desperate man, hears of work down in

Corinth-the cotton mills are hiring.

With his wife Judith-half Cherokee and who alone bears the burden of a dark and

terrible secret-and two small children, Ezra leaves the mountains for a new life

in Corinth where he has found work at the mammoth Galway Mill. An honest and

independent man, he is ill-prepared for the intrigues, politics, and greed of mill life

in the industrial city.

As the dream of someday returning to the mountains slowly, but inevitability fades,

the hardships and injustices imposed on the workers by the wealthy mill owners

become untenable. When union organizers from the North arrive in Corinth, the

situation intensifies and finally reaches a boiling point. Threatened, manipulated,

and ostracized, Ezra is faced with a choice-one that could cost him everything.

Set against the backdrop of a recovering South still showing scars of Reconstruction,

now stifled by the Great Depression, simmering but unspoken racial tensions, and

unscrupulous mill owners, None but the Living explores the struggles and pathos of

displaced people trying to maintain their identity and values in a world new and

strange to them-a world of subterfuge, of haves and have-nots, of conformity, of

injustice. Such is the saga of the Burke family.

Author Biography

Born: Greenville, SC; Education: Clemson University (BA); University of South Carolina School of Medicine. Married, with two grown children. Currently live in Greenville, SC with wife, Mary. Veteran: USMC. Previous occupations: roofer, ditch digger, forklift operator, special ed teacher, textile worker, salesman, pizza cook, seal hunter, business executive. Currently, a psychotherapist, dividing my time between my private practice and fiction writing. Have had poetry published in regional quarterlies. None but the Living is my first novel.Hobby: wilderness hiking.