Fort Appleby, Texas, 1952--the small West Texas mountain town to which the people of Houston, El Paso and San Antonio flee to escape the dreaded polio epidemic. And then polio hits Fort Appleby, a frightening four cases in a town of 800. School is closed, and the people spend their time fighting fear and attending funerals.
For senior football star Kevin Adams, 1952 is the year when his life is turned upside down by the epidemic and by the uncertainties that come of being seventeen and eager for all of life, from girls to football to great literature. Kevin struggles to sort out the many...

An uncanny understanding of both city-council operations and the newspaper business some thirty years ago gave Leonard Sanders the ability to write this powerful novel about a small Texas city and the men who run it. Sanders has combined the struggle for power in a local city government and the human interest side of its effects on the people close to the inside in an appealing and revealing story centered around an ambitious water project designed to further the city's growth.
Different views about the future of the city arise from the personalities of those who must decide. Some council...

Set in the river bottoms of southeast Texas where the Navasota and Brazos rivers come together, "High John the Conqueror" tells the story of African American cotton farmers struggling to hold on to their land during the last years of the Great Depression.
Central to the story are sharecroppers Ruby Lee and Cleveland Webster and John Cheney, a rich, white plantation owner who has farms and tenants and sharecroppers scattered all across the Brazos/Navasota country. Ruby Lee and Cleveland are sharecroppers on Cheney's land, but Cleveland's parents are struggling to hold on to the farm they...