Old Jim Canaan: A Novel - Hardcover

Skinner, Margaret

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0945575378 ISBN 13: 9780945575375

Publisher: Algonquin Books, 1990

Synopsis

"This is old Memphis--turn-of-the-century Pinch district in all its wicked Irish glory, before Ed Crump and Sodom got the upper hand and 'lilified' the town.  Margaret Skinner has caught its tone in the voices of those who live there, right up to the eve of its disappearance."  --Shelby Foote

Set in the years between 1914 and 1921, Margaret Skinner's rollicking, often hilarious fictional saga of the fortunes of several generations of an Irish-American family draws on the swirling life of Memphis, Tenneseess, to tell a story that usually gets ommitted in accounts of the early 20th century South.

About this title

From the Author

Margaret Skinner is a native of Memphis. She graduated from the University of Memphis where she has served a number of times as Visiting Writer.  She was Nida Tomlin Watts Writer-in -Residence at Sweet Briar College in Virginia and Walter E. Dakin Fellow at the Sewanee Writers' Conference.  She is the author of novels Old Jim Canaan and Molly Flanagan and the Holy Ghost.

From the Inside Flap

To reach his present affluence as tavernkeeper, gambling and sporting house owner, political boss, and prizefight promoter, Old Jim Canaan, like most of the Irish in turn-of-the-century Memphis, Tennessee, had to struggle.   For Young Jim Flanagan, the chief narrator of the novel who lives with his parents and his grandmother in Old Jim's house on Second Street, his great-uncle is an enigma--the more so because of persistent rumors that Old Jim faces trouble from a reform mayor, E.H. Crump.  ("Mr. Crump don't allow no easy riders here," W.C. Handy's song went.)
        Old Jim Canaan is a story of a new people and a young America, an Irish Catholic family making its way on the terms that society offered, trying to hold on to the old ways but confronting new conditions and opportunities.
        The people who make up Jim Canaan's world are as colorful and intriguing a cast of characters as has come along in many years.  Margaret Skinner has created a story that is as fresh as it is accomplished.  By turns comic, sad, poignant, joyful, at all time alive and vigorous, Old Jim Canaan marks the exciting debut of a talented novelist.                

About this edition

• Publisher: Algonquin Books
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0945575378
• ISBN 13: 9780945575375
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 287