The Engineer

William's House #3

by Tito Perdue

This, the third volume in Tito Perdue's tetralogy, pulls the reader further into Young Albert Pefley's narrative, following his nascent career in engineering and many high-risk detours along the way. We follow Albert through his studies at the academy, where he finds professional favor, love, and a talent for boxing, up to New York and prestigious employment. But his soul lies in the South, and before long the Yankee lifestyle makes him hanker for the simple pleasures of William's house. The future is never simple for Albert however, and before long he finds himself chasing a dream on the Pacific, where many have tried their luck but few carry it through. A sweeping tale of youth's optimism and heartfelt values, The Engineer spans the breadth of a continent and put's Albert's determination to the greatest test so far... Tito Perdue was born in 1938 in Chile, the son of an electrical engineer from Alabama who was working there at the time. The family returned to Alabama in 1941. He graduated from the University of Texas in 1961, and spent some time working in New York City, an experience which garnered him his life-long hatred of urban life. Tito has devoted himself full-time to writing since 1983. His first novel, 1991's Lee, received favorable reviews in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Reader, and The New England Review of Books. Since then he has published ten other novels, including Morning Crafts (2013), which was also published by Arktos. In 2015 he was awarded the H. P. Lovecraft Prize for Literature. Spanning two generations, the William's House tetralogy chronicles the rise of the Pefleys in Alabama across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The struggles of father William Pefley and his wife Deborah against poverty, disease, and their own expectations are charted through the birth of their four sons and their varying destinies. Each one of these sons find themselves in positions beyond their father's expectation or influence, however it is in Young Albert that the story finds its grandest expression, and in which an emerging industrial America is symbolized through his entrepreneurial adventures and exotic travels. As control of their fate passes from father to son, the brothers find themselves in a world which is in transition, in which the Georgia that gave them their first memories is changing beyond recognition and can no longer hold them. But the call of family and memory always calls them home, back to William's house, where they first saw daylight.

418 pages, Paperback

Published April 20, 2016

About the author

Tito Perdue was born in 1938 in Chile, South America where his father, an Alabama native, was employed as an electrical engineer with the Braden Copper Company. Returning to the United States in 1941, his family settled in Anniston, Alabama, remaining there until his father's employer relocated to St. Louis in 1955. In 1956 Tito graduated from Indian Springs School, a private academy located south of Birmingham, and was admitted to Antioch College in Ohio, an institution from which he was expelled in 1957 for having cohabited off-campus with the former Judy Clark, also an Antioch student. They were married later that year, both at age 18, and are together still. This year at college is the subject of The Sweet-Scented Manuscript, published in 2004 by Baskerville Publishers.

Tito attended the University of Texas in 1957-59 and 1960-61, receiving the B.A. at the end of that period. His daughter Melanie was born in January 1959, in Austin, Texas. During 1959-60, he worked as an assistant bookkeeper in the financial district of New York City. He returned to New York after graduation from the University of Texas and was employed for one year as an insurance underwriter, an experience lovingly described in his novel The New Austerities published in 1994 to very good reviews.

Tito was employed by the University of Iowa Libraries in 1968-70, and then began work as The Social Sciences Bibliographer at Iowa State University, a position held for ten years ending in 1980. He then became Assistant Director of the State University of New York at Binghamton Library and left in 1982 to become Associate Director of Emory University Library. He was discharged from that position in early 1983 as a result of policy disagreements and opted to devote himself full-time thereafter to novel writing.

In 1991 Tito's first published novel Lee was issued by Four Walls Eight Windows, a small press in New York City. The book received favorable reviews in The New York Times and elsewhere, being declared "spellbinding" by The New England Review of Books and "a stunning debut" by The Los Angeles Reader. Among negative reviews, Publishers Weekly exposed the book as the work of a reactionary snob and revealed that "it sinks under the weight of its own pretensions."

In 1994 his somewhat experimental Opportunities in Alabama Agriculture was published, a story based upon the history of his forebears on his mother's side. Extremely favorable and extended reviews were provided by Thomas Fleming, editor of Chronicles; a Magazine of American Culture, and by columnist Jim Knipfel of The New York Press. In 2007 a paperback edition of Lee was issued by Overlook Press. Tito's most recent novel, Fields of Asphodel also appeared in 2007 from the same publisher.

Tito determined to become a writer as a result of having read the novels of Thomas Wolfe when he was an adolescent. Since that time he has been writing, or preparing to write (or resuscitating), for a period of about fifty years.

Depending upon the weather and the day of the week, Tito admires Orwell, Faulkner, Dostoevsky, Hardy and the nearly-forgotten Ladislas Reymont. Among current American authors, he prefers Larry Brown, William Gay, and Cormac McCarthy. Tito's taste in music runs to Wagner and Mahler.