Texas Summer

Southern's last novel, completed in 1992, was the result of an on-again, off-again thirty-year effort to write a real exploration of his childhood in rural Texas. Although it borrows settings and scenes from stories originally completed in the 50s, the novel delves much further into the life of the young Texan Harold and his move into adolescence. A strange coming-of-age novel it is indeed, since Harold's introductions to the world of adult life are not through baseball, fishing, or books, but through marijuana, knife fights, and panty-peeping; the book is very much Southern's version of "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." A poignant and elegantly comic memoir of youth.