Title: Mark Author: Lonnie Coleman Published by: Simon and Schuster, 1981 ISBN: 0-671-42785-7 [hardcover, 319 pages]
Set in Montgomery, Alabama, and Savannah, Georgia, in the 1920's and 1930's, Mark is the story of a young boy, orphaned by the death of both parents and raised by his aunt and uncle, from adolescence to adulthood, and ending with the outbreak of World War II. The novel is filled with abundant life, with characters so totally perceived that we feel we have known them for years: Marshall, who dazzles and entertains Mark with his wild theatricality; Alice, a schoolgirl Katherine Hepburn, who enchants him with her aloofness; Margaret Torrence, his teacher, ally and mentor, intolerant of pretense and dishonesty, who encourages his budding talent as a writer; Carl, who answers the need Mark has always felt, but never quite understood, by teaching him to trust and to love.Lonnie Coleman has written a novel of one man's life that is also a novel about human beings, families, friends, teachers -- good and bad -- small-town America, the Depression, strength, courage, success and failure. The author knows the lives of people in small southern towns intimately. He writes of them sensitively, yet is never sentimental; with dialogue that is often devastatingly funny, sometimes poignant, yet always true; with characters that are flawed and lovable in their humanity, yet never stereotyped.
A writer of great integrity and insight, who perceives emotional states in all their subtlety, Lonnie Coleman has created in Mark the sense of real characters, of life truly lived, of the inward transformation of a human being from childhood into maturity.
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