"The winter of the year my father carried a gun for his own protection was the coldest on record in Chicago." So begins Ward Just's An Unfinished Season, the winter in question a postwar moment of the 1950s when the modern world lay just over the horizon, a time of rabid anticommunism, worker unrest, and government corruption. Even the small-town family could not escape the nationwide suspicion and dread of "the enemy within." In rural Quarterday, on the margins of Chicago's North Shore, nineteen-year-old Wilson Ravan watches as his father's life unravels. Teddy Ravan -- gruff,...

Justs most gripping, insightful, and nuanced novel yet shows the corrosive effects of war and its unexpected consequences for the individual conscience.

"One of the most astute writers of American fiction" (New York Times Book Review) delivers the resonant story of Alec Malone, a senator's son who rejects the family business of politics for a career as a newspaper photographer. Alec and his Swiss wife, Lucia, settle in Georgetown next door to a couple whose emigre gatherings in their garden remind Lucia of all the things Americans are not. She leaves Alec as his career founders on his refusal of an assignment to cover the Vietnam War -- a slyly subversive fictional choice from Ward Just, who was himself a renowned war correspondent. At...

-An achievement . . . that] fuses the romanticism of the early Kerouac and his mentor, Thomas Wolfe, with the wry humor of Richard Yates.---New York Times Book Review
Tommy Ogden, an outsized character holding court in his mansion outside robber-baron-era Chicago, declines to give his wife the money to commission a bust of herself from the French master Auguste Rodin, and instead announces his intention to endow a boys' school. His decision reverberates years later in the life of Lee Goodell, whose coming of age is at the heart of Ward Just's emotionally potent novel.
Lee's...

"Ward Just is both a writer's writer and an astute tracker of human souls under duplicity and duress . . . American Romantic, his eighteenth, is one of his finest."--Gail Godwin, New York Times Book Review

Harry Sanders is a young Foreign Service officer in 1960s Indochina when a dangerous and clandestine meeting with insurgents--ending in quiet disaster--and a brief but passionate encounter with Sieglinde, a young German woman, alter the course of his life.

Absorbing the impact of his misstep, Harry returns briefly to Washington before eventual...

"A doggedly restrained character study that advances its themes obliquely through atmosphere and tone. Often, the effect is quietly, even elegiacally beautiful, evoking the rhythms of Ernest Hemingway's early fiction . . . A quietly affecting, mournful achievement." -- Richmond Times-Dispatch

Ned Ayres has never wanted anything but a newspaper career. His defining moment comes early, when Ned is city editor of his hometown paper. One of his beat reporters fields a tip: William Grant, the town haberdasher, married to the bank president's daughter and the father of two...