I Walked in Arden

Edward Jevons has spent his London youth dreaming of literature while his father deems verse a waste of time. When the elder Jevons abruptly dispatches his son to America to manage a factory in the industrial town of Deep Harbor, Edward obeys, carrying with him the ghost of Shakespeare's Forest of Arden that mythic space where the exiled Duke found meaning beyond courtly artifice. In the smoke and steel of this gritty manufacturing town, he must confront whether he can smother his literary calling to fulfill familial duty, or whether he will find the courage to become the man he truly is. Crawford writes with quiet intensity about that particular anguish of a man who knows exactly who he isn't, yet lacks the resolve to become who he might. This is a searching portrait of a soul at war with itself, set against the raw machinery of early twentieth-century American industry.