Flood Crest

New York: Rinehart & Company, Inc.. Very Good+ in Good dj. (c.1947). First Edition. Hardcover. (price-clipped) [a good sound copy with just modest shelfwear, light age-toning to edges of text block; the jacket seems to have been trimmed slightly, as it's about 1/4" shorter than the book, and is edgeworn with several small tears, old internal tape reinforcement surrounding the top of the spine]. "Against the background of the Mississippi in flood, [this] interwoven story of love, of idealism and unscrupulous political scheming, of courage and violence and convict brutality behind the threatened levee." The primary characters are "Cleve Pikestaff, the lower valley's witch-hunting lecherous Senator, who sought a straw man to knock down and thereby assure his own re-election; his seductive daughter, Sudie, whose need and ambition were alike urgent; lonely young Bethany Parr and her teacher-father, strangers on their marooned houseboat; Kent Vilyard, restless young Army engineer, whose flood fighting assignment in the land of his forebears at first seemed meaningless; Corey Byrum, killer and prison trusty who thought he had enough on Cleve Pikestaff to win freedom; and ignorant, easy Georgie Mae Collins who wanted something better for herself and her lover, Pud." The author was a Pulitzer Prize-winning progressive journalist who since 1939 had resided in Greenville, Mississippi, where he was the publisher and editor of the Greenville Delta Democrat-Times. Of the several dozen books he wrote over the course of his career, mostly on topics related to the American South, only two were novels, this and "The Winds of Fear" (1944). .