1927. One of America's outstanding authors of historical novels, Boyd achieved critical and commercial acclaim with his two best-selling books Drums and Marching On. Marching On begins: Sitting sidewise on the mule, young James Fraser swung his tired, heavy legs. Behind him through evening shadows and somber trees he saw the bright green cotton patch, and in its corner, cocked up, the handles of the unhitched plough, ahead rose a wisp of smoke from the kitchen chimney. But only the cotton patch and the wisp of smoke relieved the vast and mournful scene; all else was dark pine forest and darker cypress swamp, draped in vines and Spanish moss, a shadowy underworld, lost to the sun, a world of sorrowful twilight, remote, unreal and lifeless except for one bird that flitted past, a furtive wanderer among the silences and grave, foreboding shades. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.