FROM THE PUBLISHER

THE NATURAL MAN is a comedy about coming of age in the late 1940s in an out-of-the-way corner of America called Needmore, Kentucky, "population 6 7/8 when they're all at home."

At the center is Harry Eastep, a high school senior, bookish, bespectacled, filled with vague yearnings after the considerable person of Oodles Ockerman.

Harry's intentions toward Oodles, never very pure in the first place, are refined by his new hero, Monk McHoring, the "natural man" who boasts the "dirtiest mind and the dirtiest mouth of any man or boy in the entire recorded history of Burdock County."