Brief description:
From the dust jacket:
Burke Boyce lives today in the fat farming region just back of the Hudson River’s Highlands. Just across the valley was West Point.
Living in country so saturated with history, Mr. Boyce began to wonder what the well-to~do farmers who preceded him on his acres did when the storm of freedom enveloped them—how they continued to care for their fields, how they responded to the alarms and rumors that sped up the river from New York and down the river from Lake Champlain. He consulted the records, still to be found in the district, explored the rolling countryside, collected household effects of the period, imagined his neighbors in the Colonial setting, and the story, his first novel, began to take form.
On both sides of his family Mr. Boyce counts ancestors who took part in the
Revolution—but one branch was for Washington and the other for King George. So he comes naturally by his sympathetic interest in the conflict of
convictions that grew deeper and more irreconcilable as the war increased in
fury. That struggle of conscience provides one of the dramatic threads of this story. '
The other thread is formed of the personal lives.Mr. Boyce has created. To the rumbling thunder of revolution, these people worked out their personal ambitions, knew the lure of wealth and the power of sudden love. The Americans in The Perilous Night, and particularly the father, sons, and daughters of one family, fight their private battles along with the more famous battles that have come down to us in the history books.
Burke Boyce lives today in the fat farming region just back of the Hudson River’s Highlands. Just across the valley was West Point.
Living in country so saturated with history, Mr. Boyce began to wonder what the well-to~do farmers who preceded him on his acres did when the storm of freedom enveloped them—how they continued to care for their fields, how they responded to the alarms and rumors that sped up the river from New York and down the river from Lake Champlain. He consulted the records, still to be found in the district, explored the rolling countryside, collected household effects of the period, imagined his neighbors in the Colonial setting, and the story, his first novel, began to take form.
On both sides of his family Mr. Boyce counts ancestors who took part in the
Revolution—but one branch was for Washington and the other for King George. So he comes naturally by his sympathetic interest in the conflict of
convictions that grew deeper and more irreconcilable as the war increased in
fury. That struggle of conscience provides one of the dramatic threads of this story. '
The other thread is formed of the personal lives.Mr. Boyce has created. To the rumbling thunder of revolution, these people worked out their personal ambitions, knew the lure of wealth and the power of sudden love. The Americans in The Perilous Night, and particularly the father, sons, and daughters of one family, fight their private battles along with the more famous battles that have come down to us in the history books.
Publication
The Viking Press,(1942) 1st,Hdbk,DJ,,Exc