Book Description
Though set in the middle of the last century, just as we were beginning to hear the first faint murmurs of the anti-smoking panic, this fast-paced and fact-based novel may be more timely now than when the events it describes were taking place. It focuses primarily on intense union activities at Tobacco Monolith RJR, with time out for many a comic interlude and a brief romance that leaves our anti-hero Ryerson Goode in a mood of uncertain despair.

About the Author
Hunter James has spent more than thirty-five years as an editorialist and correspondent for such papers as the Atlanta Constitution and Baltimore Sun, winning numerous press association awards for his work, as well as a share of the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. He is a highly seasoned political reporter and has written extensively on the civil rights movement of the sixties. His articles and stories have appeared in Newsweek, National Geographic (book division), Historic Preservation, Southern Magazine, The Southern Review and in many other magazines and periodicals. This is his eighth book and second work of fiction. He also served in the late seventies as a fellow for the National Endowment for the Humanities. He now spends most of his time free lancing and writing "wicked" novels and short stories, as Fred Chappell, a premier American author and North Carolina's poet laureate, said of James's first fictional work, The Rosary

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Though set in the middle of the last century, just as we were beginning to hear the first faint murmurs of the anti-smoking panic, this fast-paced and fact-based novel may be more timely now than when the events it describes were taking place. It focuses primarily on intense union activities at Tobacco Monolith RJR, with time out for many a comic interlude and a brief romance that leaves our anti-hero Ryerson Goode in a mood of uncertain despair.