The Marrowbone Marble Company - Softcover

Taylor, Glenn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 006192394X ISBN 13: 9780061923944

Publisher: Ecco, 2011

Synopsis

“M. Glenn Taylor’s plain spoken eloquence on labor, race, and war recalls the voices in Studs Terkel’s inspired Working. The Marrowbone Marble Company is a novel of stirring clarity and power.”
—Jayne Anne Phillips, author of Lark and Termite

 

Author M. Glenn Taylor was nominated for the National Book Critic’s Circle Award for his novel The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart. Taylor returns spectacularly with The Marrowbone Marble Company, a sweeping story set against the changing landscape of post-World War II America that recalls The Story of Edgar Sawtelle and the early lyrical work of Cormac McCarthy. A masterwork of Southern fiction that the National Book Award-winning author of Spartina, John Casey, calls, “a terrific rough-and-tumble novel,” The Marrowbone Marble Company is a gift from a truly exhilarating American voice.

About this title

Review:

Amazon Best Books of the Month, May 2010: National Book Critics Circle Award-finalist M. Glenn Taylor's impresses with this second novel. The title is a mouthful, but seems just right given the satisfying and substantive story of a man determined to create his own utopia in the hardscrabble and racially-divided West Virginia of the post-war years. Loyal Ledford, a poor-as-dirt orphan, works the furnaces of the local glass factory, yet he plots his escape by joining the Marines. He soon finds himself in another purgatory--Guadalcanal--in the last years of WWII. With a wounded body and mind, Ledford returns home, determined to start a family and live on his own terms. On old family land, he rediscovers kin and builds a marble factory from the ground up with the help of two part-Indian cousins, an idealistic white preacher, and an African-American family. Within the novel's historic context, the small Marrowbone community, comprised of unique and open-minded souls is, like the marbles it produces, a perfect microcosm within a very imperfect world. --Lauren Nemroff

From the Back Cover:

1941. Loyal Ledford works the swing shift at the Mann Glass factory in Huntington, West Virginia. He courts Rachel, the boss’s daughter, a company nurse with coal black hair. But when Pearl Harbor is attacked, Ledford, like so many young men of his time, sets his life on a new course.

Upon his return from service in the war, Ledford starts a family with Rachel but chafes under the authority at Mann Glass. He is a lost man, disconnected from the present and haunted by his violent past, until he meets his cousins the Bonecutter brothers. Their land, mysterious, elemental Marrowbone Cut, calls to Ledford, and it is there that The Marrowbone Marble Company is slowly forged. Over the next two decades, the factory grounds become a vanguard of the civil rights movement and a home for those intent on change. Such a home inevitably invites trouble, and Ledford must fight for his family.

Returning to the West Virginia territory of his critically acclaimed novel, The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart, Glenn Taylor recounts the transformative journey of a man and his community.

About this edition

• Publisher: Ecco
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 006192394X
• ISBN 13: 9780061923944
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368