A Far Country — Volume 1
1915
A Far Country opens with Hugh Paret, a corporate lawyer on the American eastern seaboard, looking back on the long path that brought him to disillusionment. Raised between a stern Calvinist father and his own restless romantic impulses, young Hugh aspires to Harvard and all the promise it represents. But as he rises through the world of business and politics, he encounters the moral compromises that American success demands: corrupt political machines, ruthless corporate maneuvering, and the slow erosion of whatever idealism he once possessed. His foil is Hermann Krebs, a fellow student who works his way through college and takes an honest socialist road, a man who chose a different path through the same hungry, ambitious world. Through Hugh's unhappy marriage to Maude and his complicated relationship with his childhood friend Nancy, Churchill paints a portrait of a man who achieved everything and found it insufficient. This is a novel about the price of American ambition, and what remains when the promises of youth collide with the compromises of maturity.
