Thorofare

469 pages. Octavo (8 1/4" x 55 3/4") bound in original publisher's blue cloth with yellow lettering to spine. Second printing. Once again Chris Morley is himself, this time in the person of small Geoffrey Barton, English lad, shortly to become Jeff Barton, American citizen-in-the-making. The book takes its title from a winding street that goes through the English village where Geoffrey is being brought up by a regiment of aunts. Into this aunt hill comes the almost legendary Uncle Dan from America, and, before he goes back again to that wild west of ""Chesspeaks"" (substitute Baltimore), he persuades his sister Bee and Geoffrey to come with him. There's an immediacy in the pattern of the days that follow, as Geoffrey, Briton, becomes Jeff, American, for highlighted and undertoned are marshalled those little differences between two allies that are great gaps in mutual understanding and sympathy, --differences in pronunciation, in accent, in phraseology, in custom and manner and emphasis. But it is more than this. It is a searching and sympathetic and understanding picture of a boy growing up; a nostalgic background look to the pranks and disasters and adventures of boyhood, the cruelties and the imaginings, the dreams and the realities. Therefore becomes a symbol of the winding thread linking England and America, and at its close, newly made citizen Jeff Barton, is about to go back to England for a holiday, to revisit the scenes of boyhood. The period is a generation ago. Morley knows both countries well, from his own boyhood on; and his gallery of characters is a vital one. There is little of patterned plot. The book is the boy and the man. Condition: Glue stains on pastedowns and end papers, book plate on front end paper, spine lightly sunned, spin extremities rubbed else good.