Destitution, hunger, cruelty, rootlessness-all the odds stand against Jacky Anderson, the young boy who struggles toward his adolescence in this powerful, popular American classic. Yet despite the hardships and hard times of the novel's Depression-era Kansas, Jacky prevails. Resourcefully, doggedly, on a journey that takes him from Wichita to Corpus Christi with his hapless mother and abusive stepfather, he nurtures his spirit of independence and capacity to love. Never failing to "tough it out" in his passage through the seedy worlds of the disappointed and dispossessed, Jacky may not escapr...

When Michael was going to school, his best friend's parents were murdered; the problem was that he was aware of it before it happened. His friend had told him that he would have done it. His friend was from a wealthy family, and they had given him everything he had ever wanted. His friend had thought that the life he was living while going to school, would have been the one he would continue to live for the rest of his life. He loathed school, and when he was told he had to go to college so that he could learn to earn for himself, he had his parents murdered. Michael was the only one who knew...