For Professors
Desk CopyFor Media
Review CopyPurple Hearts
by C. W. Smith
Published by: TCU Press
368 Pages, 6.00 x 9.00 in, 7 b&w illus.
For Professors: Exam Copies
Set during the turmoil of World War II, Purple Hearts is the story of the epileptic scion of an East Texas timber and oil fortune and his marriage to a stunning stranger desperate for sanctuary. Though naive and virginal, thirty-year-old Georgie Karacek wins Sylvia through his charm and kindness. Longing to prove himself, he then hides his illness to join the army. Sylvia’s relationship with Georgie’s overprotective mother proves difficult, so to make ends meet she takes on a boarder, Robert, in Georgie’s absence. Soon Robert and Sylvia grow close, and he presses her to run away with him.
When Georgie’s epilepsy comes to light, he is discharged, and on returning home he suspects that his bride and the boarder are lovers. But wartime conditions explode into rioting, and that uproar puts them at odds with the town when Georgie helps a black friend flee.
Purple Hearts is based loosely on events in Beaumont, Texas, in July of 1943, when shipyard workers rampaged following a rumor that a black man had raped a sailor’s wife. Several people died and scores were injured, and that riot echoed those in Detroit, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Writer/critic Bryan Woolley has hailed Purple Hearts as “the best novel I’ve read about the home front during World War II . . . [it] illumines the dark fact that there was more to that home scene than Rosie the Riveter and War Bond drives.”
When Georgie’s epilepsy comes to light, he is discharged, and on returning home he suspects that his bride and the boarder are lovers. But wartime conditions explode into rioting, and that uproar puts them at odds with the town when Georgie helps a black friend flee.
Purple Hearts is based loosely on events in Beaumont, Texas, in July of 1943, when shipyard workers rampaged following a rumor that a black man had raped a sailor’s wife. Several people died and scores were injured, and that riot echoed those in Detroit, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Writer/critic Bryan Woolley has hailed Purple Hearts as “the best novel I’ve read about the home front during World War II . . . [it] illumines the dark fact that there was more to that home scene than Rosie the Riveter and War Bond drives.”
C. W. Smith has twice won the Jesse Jones “Best Novel” Award from the Texas Institute of Letters and has held two NEA Creative Writing Fellowships and a Dobie-Paisano Fellowship at the University of Texas. Purple Hearts is his eighth novel. He is a Dedman Family Distinguished Professor at Southern Methodist University.