Clyde Edgerton

Preston Clearwater has been a criminal since stealing two chain saws and 1600 pairs of aviator sunglasses from the Army during the Second World War. Back on the road in post-war North Carolina , a member of a car-theft ring, he picks up hitch-hiking Henry Dampier, an innocent nineteen-year-old Bible salesman. Clearwater immediately recognizes Henry as just the associate he needs--one who will believe Clearwater is working as an F.B.I. spy; one who will drive the cars Clearwater steals as Clearwater follows along in another car at a safe distance. Henry joyfully sees a chance to lead a dual life as Bible salesman and a G-man.During his hilarious and scary adventures we learn of Henry's fundamentalist youth, an upbringing that doesn't prepare him for his new life. As he falls in love and questions his religious training, Henry begins to see he's being used--that the fun and games are over, that he is on his own in a way he never imagined.

The much-loved author of the bestselling Raney and Walking Across Egypt is back with an endearing novel of calamity and comedy that celebrates the spirit and spunk of old age.

Evil comes to sleepy Listre, N.C., circa 1950, in the form of a stranger with a pencil-thin mustache and a trunkful of dirty movies.

She has as much business keeping a stray dog as she would walking across Egyptwhich not so incidentally is the title of her favorite hymn. She's Mattie Rigsbee, an independent, strong-minded senior citizen who, at seventy-eight, might be slowing down just a bit. When teenage delinquent Wesley Benfield drops in on her life, he is even less likely a companion than the stray dog. But, of course, the dog never tasted her mouth-watering pound cake. Wise and witty, down-home and real, Walking Across Egypt is a book for everyone.

In Red Eye, Clyde Edgerton leads us back in time to turn-of-the-century Colorado, where a motley crew of innocents and scoundrels, visionaries and vultures tells us How the West Was Made Safe for Free Enterprise. The scene is pueblo country and the man with the plan is Billy Blankenship, frontier entrepreneur. Blankenship aims to turn the newly discovered Native American cliff dwellings of Mesa Largo into America's first Roadside Attraction. He enlists the aid of North Carolina embalmer P.J. Copeland in the (ahem) undertaking. The unrepentantly polygamist bishop has other plans for the dwelling - that is, if the bounty hunter doesn't get him first. The basis of this astounding new novel is historical truth - that, in 1857, a troop of Mormons using Indian wiles attacked a wagon train of pioneers near Salt Lake City. Orders from Brigham Young were to leave none alive to tell the tale. Edgerton has a keen sense of the dark undercurrents of the West. He knows that there were, on both sides of right and wrong, several "left to tell the tale."

Go by the Baptist Cemetery in Summerlin any Sunday after church and you'll see all kinds of families out there weeding and sweeping the family plots. There's always lots to do - dumping out the potted poinsettias and dusting off the plastic peonies, making sure the kids know everybody dead and how they are kin to everybody living. To most folks, which cemetery, which family plot, which tombstone and what's carved on it are of consequence. And the older you are, the more so. In the Bales-McCord family, two old people are at the point of contemplating their final resting places - Glenn and Laura Bales. Everybody is wondering which one will go first. A third old person looking death in the eye is Uncle Grove McCord, hell-raising, bootlegging, bush pilot, black sheep brother of Glenn Bales's first wife. Grove left Summerlin years ago and has buried several wives. He's got a good healthy one now out in Arkansas. But he pines for Summerlin where he was raised and is making his own private arrangements to be buried there. "Hell," he says, "I can't be buried beside all my wives." Clyde Edgerton fans won't be surprised that the characters in his funny new novel end up with too many graves and too few tombstones. It all happens within the space of just a couple of weeks and it's told by everybody involved, from Buster Douglas, the Truck Freight Limited driver who delivers Uncle Grove's tombstone to Wilma and Harold Fuller, Visitors-to-the-Sick. Join them as they gather in Summerlin to attend to the business of passing on - and passing down. As Uncle Grove points out, "You're history longer than you are fact."

The decision was an important one. That's why Sarah left her job in England to visit her grandmother in Spain. There she could think things out - decide whether to marry her childhood sweetheart. She hadn't counted on meeting someone like the darkly handsome Carlos Hastings, and she was hypnotized by his alluring charm. It didn't seem to matter that she was an English nanny and he a man of the world. But it did complicate her decision. Should she settle for the secure life of a doctor's wife, or risk an affair with a man who would never have serious feelings about her?

Edgerton chronicles 20 years in the lives of the Copelands of North Carolina, a family just on the fringes of white trash. Albert buys kits to build floatplanes which never work, and his floatplane logbook becomes a family album of sorts.

"Clyde Edgerton's Raney is the comic love story of a marriage between Raney, a small-town Southern Baptist, and Charles, a librarian with liberal leanings from Atlanta, united by their shared enthusiasm for country music. The novel both interrogates and honors the faiths and foibles of its subjects as the relationship is tested through trials and revelations. Despite the couple's differences, their marriage slowly evolves into a relationship of equals in which both are willing to compromise for the good of the other and the marriage. Told though Raney's naive and mesmerizing perspective as a southern storyteller, serious and sometimes heartbreaking moments give way to a humorous and joyful tale that pokes fun at and holds respect for just about everyone who passes through these pages. Raney, Edgerton's first novel, was originally published in 1985. It represents some of Edgerton's most comic, candid, and ambitious writing. This Southern Revivals edition includes a new introduction by the author and a preface from series editor Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr., director of the University of South Carolina Institute for Southern Studies."--

Edgerton has four kids ranging in age from five to 30 years old. After three decades of fatherhood, there are certain things he has learned during his tenure. His way of raising his children involves, of course, lots of humor, but also the sound advice of a lifelong educator.