Eyes: a novel

by Janet Burroway

"The American South on a hot September day. Angus Rugg, a famous eye surgeon, learns that he has an incurable heart disease; a few hours later he has to tell his own patient Andrew Dodds, a local journalist, that he is going blind. Jadeen Spatch, the fiancee of Rugg's son, has been told by the headmistress of the school where she teaches that she must submit to the racist tradition of the community. Rugg's wife is pregnant and making happy preparations for the child. At the end of this extraordinary day, Rugg has to make an almost routine speech at the medical school: but Dodds has decided to cover it for his newspaper, and by the next morning there is an uproar in every State of the Union. Newspapers all over the country are scandalized by Rugg's revelations. Is there any moral difference, they demand, between the experiments which Rugg has conducted in an allied prisoner-of-war camp and experiments carried out in more infamous camps elsewhere?
Eyes is not only a picture of the American South in its day-to-day reality; it is about people anywhere, how they live together and react on each other; and above all about people who have to make a choice between the conflicting dictates of their conscience.
This is Janet Burroway's third novel. Like Descend Again and The Dancer from the Dance, it is intelligent, accomplished and witty; but it is also her most exciting novel to date, a novel which illuminates some of the more important issues of our time." [from the front flap]

Hardcover

Published January 1, 1966

About the author

Janet Burroway is the author of seven novels including The Buzzards, Raw Silk (runner up for the national Book award), Opening Nights, and Cutting Stone; a volume of poetry, Material Goods; a collection of essays, Embalming Mom; and two children's books, The Truck on the Track and The Giant Jam Sandwich. Her most recent plays, Medea With Child, Sweepstakes, Division of Property, and Parts of Speech, have received readings and productions in New York, London, San Francisco, Hollywood, and various regional theatres. Her Writing Fiction is the most widely used creative writing text in America, and a multi-genre textbook, Imaginative Writing, appeared in 2002. A B.A. from Barnard College and M.A. from Cambridge University, England, she was Yale School of Drama RCA-NBC Fellow 1960-61, and is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor Emerita at the Florida State University in Tallahassee.