Harold Raley: 3 books

In the seafaring tradition of Defoe and Sabatini, The Prodigal is a tale of the shipwreck and struggle for survival of a young American ship’s carpenter who escapes one captivity only to fall into more dangerous circumstances. The story unfolds as he makes his way to Boston, then to Jamaica, Mexico,...

*Barefoot  on a Frosty Morn  *is a literary and genealogical tapestry of several families over three centuries. The genealogical threads stretch back to England and France and unfold in step with America's continental expansion. The families crisscross north, south, and west as the tapestry grows...

Most of the essays in this book first appeared as newspaper columns and differ from the originals only in minor, editorial ways. The real challenge for me, used as I was to academic and fiction writing, was the necessary brevity of the essays. The discipline of having to compress my ideas into a finite...