A House Divided

by Fredrick Barton

ISBN:0-9728143-1-0 Paperback $16.95

ISBN: 0-9728143-0-2 Hardback $26.95

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Winner of the Faulkner/

Wisdom Prize

At a spirited 1968 anti-war rally in a historic church

on New Orleans's storied St. Charles Avenue, two friends address an overflow

crowd. Jeff Caldwell, a white Southern Baptist preacher, introduces his boss, Dr. George Washington Brown, the African-American president of one of the nation's most prominent civilrightsorganizations. A House Divided explores how these men, united in philosophy and friendship but divided by race, class and the circumstances of their rearing, come to stand next to one another on what proves to be a fateful night.

Told by his historian son, Thomas, A House Divided is Jeff Caldwell's story, an account of how a dirt-poor white boy from central Louisiana survived his own turbulent family, the cultural, educational and material deprivations of the Great Depression and the horrors of World War II to stand for justice at the elbow of one of the great figures in the history of a transformative era. And in being Jeff's story, A House Divided is inevitably the story of his family, of his father Pruitt and mother Osby, of his wife Billye, a middle-class pharmacist's daughter, and of his children Danielle and Tommy. For brave individuals, courageous and admirable though they may be, are still human beings, children with parents and siblings, later husbands and wives and parents themselves. The actions they take may alter society, but the sacrifices they require of themselves directly and immediately affect the lives of those who are closest to them.

PRAISE FOR A HOUSE DIVIDED

"A House Divided is an old-fashioned novel in the way that All the King's Men is an old-fashioned novel. It's Southern--Louisiana, no less--but it's about the whole human spirit. It's full of vivid incident, uncommon intelligence about us all, high drama, New Orleans exotica, and important history for which it offers great compassion and insight. And in its old-fashioned way, it keeps you up late, reading."
- Richard Ford, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Independence Day and The Sports Writer

"In A House Divided, Fredrick Barton creates a cast of memorable characters from the ghosts of the civil rights movement and poses some tough moral questions. An impressive work."
- Curtis Wilkie, author of Dixie and longtime correspondent for The Boston Globe

"A novel of the civil rights movement from the Southern liberal perspective, a story of the flawed but relentless warriors, black and white, who became the Movement's native saints and martyrs. Expansive, urgent, indiscreet-an unusual narrative achievement."

- Hal Crowther, author of Cathedrals of Kudzu and Unarmed But Dangerous

"A House Divided is a tour de force. Fredrick Barton has written a novel about the civil rights movement and its soldiers that is as complex, tragic, and healing as the era itself. Lives intertwine, unravel and redeem themselves in this finely wrought and ultimately poignant novel."

- Connie May Flowler, author of Before Women Had Wings and When Katie Wakes

"In A House Divided Fredrick Barton skillfully carves an essential tale of courageous human beings striving for community in the face of white-hot hatred and the burden of their own inevitably flawed natures."

- Will D. Campbell, winner of the Presidential Humanities Medal and author of Brother to a Dragonfly and Forty Acres and a Goat

"The struggle for racial equality in the South has had its heroes, its martyrs, its demons and its still-buried secrets. In clean, absorbing prose, Fredrick Barton now brings us its narrative. The story is visually beautiful, but unflinching in the bleakness of the truth it portrays. He reminds us of the best, and the worst, moments in our nation's history. This novel is a work of imagination and story-telling that is long overdue."
- Elizabeth Cox, author of Night Talk and Bargains in the Real World

"Fredrick Barton, in his new novel, writes brilliantly of Louisiana and race relations, two tough subjects. But he does far more than that. He illuminates the present condition of the American soul. A House Divided is an important book".
- Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain and They Whisper

Fredrick Barton, an award-winning fiction writer and critic, holds a B.A. from Valparaiso University and did graduate work under a Danforth Fellowship, taking degrees from UCLA and the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. Currently he is Provost and Vice Chancellor at the University of New Orleans, where he teaches fiction writing and film criticism. He has written on film since 1980 for the New Orleans weekly Gambit and since 1989 for The Cresset, a national review of literature, the arts, and public affairs. Mr. Barton has also authored three other novels, A House Divided (currently available from University of New Orleans Press), Courting Pandemonium, and With Extreme Prejudice, as well as a play in verse, Ash Wednesday.