The River Is Home
&
Angel City
About The River is Home: "A charming excursion into a lost world." --New York Times Book Review
About The River is Home: "I
unreservedly recommend this novel. It is simply and powerfully written,
with plenty of local color. The River is Home stands out in the reader's
mind as a work of art." --New Orleans Times-Picayune
 The River is Home
In 1950, Patrick Smith was a 23-year old who had grown up
in a small Mississippi town during the Depression. Having been an avid
reader from his early days and a writer whose local paper published his
poems and sports columns, he finished writing a novel, but shelved it
for two years, possibly apprehensive about it rejection and unsure of
just how to get a book published. He finally showed it to one of his
English professors at the University of Mississippi and received enough
encouragement that - with some confidence - he sent it to Little, Brown
and Company in Boston without an agent and without any fanfare. Probably
to his amazement, they published it. Such is the printing history of
Smith's popular novel, The River is Home.
The River is Home was was first
published in 1953 when Smith was just 26 years old. It met with critical
acclaim and launched him into his career as a novelist.
At this time Smith was the owner of a Studebaker automobile
dealership in Mendenhall, Mississippi. He also sold appliances out of
this business. Writing was just a past time for him at this stage of his
life. The photo above is of Smith in front of his automobile
dealership, around 1952.
The story of The River is Home revolves around a Mississippi family's struggle to cope with changes in their rural environment. It is the story of  Skeeter,
a young boy growing up in a family poor in material goods but rich in
spiritual values, a family that lived in harmony with their
surroundings.
Those surroundings consisted of swamps, woodlands and the
ever-present river that connected them to civilization, provided them
with an abundant food supply, and challenged them with periodic floods.
How each member of the boy's family did or did not adapt to the demands
of the river is a study in contrasts.
The setting of the swamp, full of mosquitoes and gators
would turn up again in Smith's later Florida books, especially Forever Island and Allapattah.
The River is Home & Angel City
$19.95 Hardbound, 399 pages - 
Angel City
Read the entire 1st chapter of Angel City for FREE here.
The River is Home & Angel City
$19.95 Hardbound, 399 pages -
Smith in a photo of the gate at the set of the movie, Angel City.
In the mid-1970s, after reading a newspaper article about
the plight of migrant workers in south Florida, he found an issue that
would absorb his spare time for several years. The newspaper told about a
migrant crew chief who had enslaved his workers for more than two
years, who whouldn't pay them or let them out of the camp, and who beat
them regularly. The police finally arrested the crew chief and took him
to court, but had to release him when none of the workers, all of whom
were scared of him, would testify against him.
Smith with actor Ralph Waite on the set of Angel City.
Alarmed that such migrant camps still existed in the
1970s, Smith went to Miami and read through old newspapers, where he
found a number of stories about migrants being enslaved by the crew
chiefs, often without the knowledge of the owners of the fields. Smith
then began spending his weekends and vacations doing what he calls
"physical research." He would don scruffy clothes, let his beard grow,
and show up in Homestead to join migrants picking tomatoes or okra or
cucumbers or squash, whatever was in season.
Earning a meager $35 a week, sleeping in buggy hovels and
trying to keep out of the frequent knife fights, he made mental notes of
the sights and smells and noises. Apparently no one ever suspected that
the quiet fellow with the Mississippi drawl was actually a writer.
After spending more than a year doing "research" for the novel, which he entitled Angel City,
Smith wrote it in just a few weeks, so filled was he of the sordid
conditions of the camps and fields. When asked why he wanted to write
such a novel, Smith replies, "The first step toward eliminating
injustice is to expose it, and this was my primary goal in writing this
novel."
 Angel City
follows the course of the Teeters, a West Virginia family come to
Florida to better their lives. What they find is degradation in a
migrant labor camp. His expose of those camps in Angel City
served its intended purpose: to bring about change. Though this novel
served as a social statement, it also works as a well-told social story,
a work of literary art.
The movie based on Angel City, a
CBS "Movie of the Week" starring Ralph Waite, Jennifer Jason Leigh,
Jennifer Warren, Mitch Ryan, Robert MacNaughton and Paul Winfield,
brought the story of the Teeters and the reality of migrant labor camp
conditions to an even wider audience.
As interest increases in the novels of Patrick Smith,
literary historians are sure to place this one near the top rank of his
output.
The River is Home & Angel City
$19.95 Hardbound, 399 pages -
© 2007, Panorama Studios. All Rights Reserved
|
