The work of a superbly gifted writer at the height of his powers, Lonnie Coleman’s Mark is destined to become a classic—the wonderfully moving story of a young man growing up in a small southern town. It is a novel about the lives of ordinary people, the exploration of feelings, the capacity to love, the discovery of sexual choice.
Set in Montgomery, Alabama, and Savannah, Georgia, in the twenties and thirties, Mark is the story of a young boy, orphaned by death of both parents and raised by his aunt and uncle, from adolescence to adulthood, and ending with the outbreak of World War II. The novel is filled with abudant life, with characters so totally perceived that we feel we have known them for years: Marshall, who dazzles and entertains Mark with wild theatricality; Alice, a schoolgirl Katharine Hepburn, who enchants him with her aloofness; Margaret Torrence, his teacher, ally and mentor, intolerant of pretense and dishonesty, who encourages his budding talent as a writer; Carl, who answers the need Mark has always felt, but never quite understood, by teaching him to trust and to love.
Lonnie Coleman has written a novel of one man’s life that is also a novel about human beings, families, friends, teachers—good and bad—small-town America, the Depression, strength, courage, success and failure. The author knows the lives of people in small southern towns intimately. He writes of them sensitively, yet is never sentimental; with dialogue that is often devastatingly funny, sometimes poignant, yet always true; with characters that are flawed and lovable in their humanity, yet never stereotyped.
A writer of great integrity and insight, who perceives emotional states in all their subtlety, Lonnie Coleman has created in Mark the sense of real characters, of life truly lived, of the inward transformation of a human being from childhood into maturity.