Lewis Rand

Lewis Rand is a boy who watches the tobacco fields stretch endless and feels the whole world pressing down on his shoulders. His father Gideon has rolled the same leaf for generations and wants his son to do the same. But Lewis has a different fire in him. He wants to be a lawyer, a man of words and influence, not hands. When he meets Adam Gaudylock, a wild hunter who lives by his own rules in the Virginia wilderness, Lewis sees a glimpse of freedom beyond the tobacco cask he and his father carry to market. This is the story of a young man's brutal struggle against his father's dreams, against poverty, against a world that tells a farm boy he is nothing. Mary Johnston, writing in 1908, captures something essential about the American hunger to become someone else, to remake oneself in a nation still young enough to believe in transformation. The novel thuds with the weight of a son who must break his father's heart to find his own heart. For readers who love historical fiction about the early republic, about the cost of ambition, about the first generation born into a nation that promised everything and delivered only the chance to fight for it.