Louis D. Rubin's first novel paints in golden light the spring and summer of a boy's thirteenth year in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1936. Rubin catches not only the passage from childhood to adolescence - and its attendant woes and triumphs - but also the streets, sounds, sights, and people of his native city in an era now past but made luminous in the language of time revisited. During the long, hot summer of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the firing on Fort Sumter, Omar Kohn experiences his first love, builds a boat, learns how not to write poetry, and begins to see the flaws in his boyhood heroes. Along his journey to summer's end we meet vivid the Marvelous Ringgold, streetcar motorist extraordinaire; Omar's mischievous best friend, Billy Cartwright; the rabbi and Omar's fellow pupils at Sabbath School; the black maid and yardman, Viola and Dominique; Dr. Horatio Chisholm, poet and extoller of local glories and pieties; and aged ex-ferryboat captain Major William Izard Frampton, C.S.A., whose wartime exploits don't quite match up with documented history. There is also Helen, from Philadelphia, in whose company Omar learns to question various assumptions about his world.
Louis Decimus Rubin Jr. was born into a Jewish family in Charleston, South Carolina, on November 19, 1923. He studied for two years at the College of Charleston, served in the Army during World War II (1939–1945), and earned a BA in history at the University of Richmond.
Louis D. Rubin is a writer, editor, publisher, educator, and literary critic, and perhaps the person most responsible for the emergence of southern literature as a field of scholarly inquiry. He served on the faculty of Hollins College (now Hollins University) in Roanoke, Virginia. He coedited Southern Renascence, an important compilation of southern studies; founded the journal Hollins Critic; established the Southern Literary Studies series at the Louisiana State University Press; cofounded the Southern Literary Journal; cofounded Algonquin Books, a literary press that showcases emerging southern writers; and promoted the early work of important southern writers, including Clyde Edgerton, John Barth, and Virginia writers Lee Smith and Annie Dillard.