White People (36 page)

ALLAN GURGANUS

Allan Gurganus lives in a small town in North Carolina. His honors include the
Los Angeles Times
Book Prize, the Southern Book Prize, and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

OLDEST LIVING CONFEDERATE WIDOW TELLS ALL

Lucy married at the turn of the last century, when she was fifteen and Colonel William Marsden was fifty. If he was a “veteran of the War for Southern Independence,” Lucy became a “veteran of the veteran” with a unique perspective on Southern history and Southern manhood. Lucy’s story encompasses everything from the tragic death of a Confederate boy soldier to the feisty narrator’s daily battles in the Home—complete with visits from a mohawk-coiffed candy striper.
Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All
is proof that brilliant, emotional storytelling remains at the heart of great fiction.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-72663-7

PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS

With great narrative inventiveness and emotional amplitude, Allan Gurganus gives us artistic Manhattan in the wild 1980s, where young artists—refugees from the middle class—hurl themselves into playful work and serious fun. Our guide is Hartley Mims Jr., a Southerner whose native knack for happiness might thwart his literary ambitions. Through his eyes we encounter the composer Robert Christian Gustafson, an Iowa preacher’s son whose good-looks constitute both a mythic draw and a major limitation, and Angelina “Alabama” Byrnes, a failed deb, five feet tall but bristling with outsized talent. These friends shelter each other, promote each other’s work, and compete erotically. When tragedy strikes, this trio grows up fast, somehow founding, at the worst of times, the truest sort of family.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-70203-7

THE PRACTICAL HEART

In his fictional town of Falls, North Carolina—a watchful zone of stifling mores—Allan Gurganus’s fond and comical characters risk everything to protect their improbable hopes from prejudice, poverty, and betrayal. Muriel Fraser, a poor Scottish-born spinster, is the subject of a John Singer Sargent portrait in the imagination of her devoted great-nephew. Tad Worth, a young man dying of AIDS, finds ways to restore vitality to old friends and eighteenth-century houses. Overnight, one pillar of the community, accused of child molesting, becomes the village pariah. And Clyde Delman, ugliest if kindest man in Falls, finds the love of his eight-year-old son jeopardized when troubling family secrets arise. In each of these splendid complex tales, Allan Gurganus wrings truths—sometimes bruising, ofttimes warming—from human hearts as immense as they are local.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-72763-4

WHITE PEOPLE

In these eleven stories, Allan Gurganus gives heartbreaking and hilarious voice to the fears, desires and triumphs of a grand cast of Americans. Here are war heroes bewildered by the complex negotiations of family life, former debutantes called upon to muster resources they never knew they had, senior citizens startled by their own bravery, and married men brought up short by the marvelous possibilities of entirely different lives. Written with flair, wit, and deep humanity, this award-winning volume confirms Allan Gurganus as one of the finest writers of our time.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-70427-7

VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES
Available at your local bookstore, or visit
www.randomhouse.com

FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, AUGUST 2000

Copyright
©
1990 by Allan Gurganus

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States of America by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1990.

Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

All the stories and novellas in this volume have been previously published. Grateful acknowledgment is due to the following:

The New Yorker:
“Minor Heroism.”
The New American Review:
“Condolences to Every One of Us.”
The Paris Review:
“Art History” and “It Had Wings” (reprinted in
Harper’s)
. North Carolina Wesleyan College Press, which published the opening of “Breathing Room” and “Blessed Assurance” as limited edition chapter books.
Harper’s:
“America Competes,” “Reassurance,” and “Nativity, Caucasian.” New American Library, which published “Adult Art” in
Men on Men II: Best New Gay Fiction
, edited by George Stambolian.
The Quarterly:
“A Hog Loves Its Life.”
GRANTA:
“Blessed Assurance.” The author wishes to thank the editors of these magazines, anthologies, and small publishing houses for their early encouragement and sustaining belief.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Gurganus, Allan.
White people / Allan Gurganus. — 1st ed.
p.  cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-76412-6
I.  Title.
PS3557.U814 A6 1991
813’.54—dc20 90052943

Author photograph © Marion Ettlinger

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