A Fugitive in Walden Woods

Praise for The American Novels series:

＂A glorious meditation on justice, truth, loyalty, story, and the alchemical effects of love.＂ ?NPR on The Boy in His Winter

＂Like all Mr. Lock’s books, this is an ambitious work, where ideas crowd together on the page like desperate men on a battlefield.＂ ?Wall Street Journal on American Meteor

＂A mesmerizingly twisted, richly layered homage to a pioneer of American Gothic fiction.＂ ?New York Times Book Review on The Port-Wine Stain

Samuel Long escapes slavery in Virginia, traveling the Underground Railroad to Walden Woods, where he encounters Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Lloyd Garrison, and other transcendentalists and abolitionists. While Long will experience his coming-of-age at Walden Pond, his hosts will receive a lesson in human dignity, culminating in a climactic act of civil disobedience.

Against this historical backdrop, Norman Lock’s powerful narrative examines issues that continue to divide the United States: racism, privilege, and what it means to be free in America.

Norman Lock is the author of, most recently, the short story collection Love Among the Particles, and the three previous books in The American Novels series: The Boy in His Winter, a re-envisioning of Mark Twain’s classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; American Meteor, an homage to Walt Whitman and William Henry Jackson; and The Port-Wine Stain, an homage to Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas Dent Mütter. He lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey, where he is at work on the next book in The American Novels series.