Children of Strangers is the powerful and moving novel of love in a community bound by race and class. Famie is a mulatto girl whose ancestors—free blacks—rivaled the white planters in wealth and culture. But on a Louisiana plantation in the 1920s, she is an outcast, rejected by whites because of her black ancestors and unwilling to associate with the sharecroppers who are descendants of slaves.
An illicit love affair with a white landowner leaves her with a son, Joel. Her dream is that Joel will someday become accepted into white society. But in her struggle to transcend race and class, Famie must sacrifice the last links to her past.
About the Author
Lyle Saxon (1891-1946) ranks among Louisiana’s most outstanding writers. During the 1920s and 1930s, he was the central figure in the region’s literary community and was widely known as a raconteur and bon vivant. In addition to Lafitte the Pirate and Children of Strangers, he also wrote Fabulous New Orleans, Old Louisiana, Father Mississippi: The Story of the Great Flood of 1927, The Friends of Joe Gilmore (F), and was a coauthor of Gumbo Ya-Ya: Folk Tales of Louisiana with Edward Dreyer and Robert Tallant. During the Depression he directed the state WPA Writers’ Project, which produced the WPA Guide to Louisiana and the WPA Guide to New Orleans.
About the Foreword Writer
Chance Harvey was a student at Tulane University when she came across a collection of letters addressed to Saxon. These letters began a fascination with Saxon that led her to a life-long passion and resulted in Saxon’s biography, The Life and Selected Letters of Lyle Saxon also published by Pelican. Harvey resides in Oxford, Mississippi.
CHILDREN OF STRANGERS
By Lyle Saxon
Foreword by Chance Harvey
FICTION / Historical
320 pp. 5 1/2 x 8 1/4
3rd Edition
ISBN: 9781455615421 pb