Richard Marius - Novels

Novels

Marius wrote four novels based in East Tennessee from roughly 1850 to 1950. Three—The Coming of Rain (1969), After the War (1992), and An Affair of Honor (2001)—form a loose trilogy. His second novel, Bound for the Promised Land (1976), is a stand-alone work.

The Coming of Rain, was Marius' first novel and established Bourbon County, a fictional landscape which closely resembled his native Loudon County and in which most of his fiction would be set. The book followed the lives of a set of small town characters in the border state in the traumatic period following the American Civil War. Joyce Carol Oates reviewed the novel for The New York Times Book Review, calling it "a slender, tragic, perhaps beautiful story of the ruins of dreams." The Book-of-the-Month Club made the novel an alternate selection. Marius later converted it into a stageplay, which was produced by the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in 1998.

Bound for the Promised Land also begins in East Tennessee, but the setting soon migrates to the West. Set in the 1850s amid the Gold Rush, it follows a family in a wagon train that sets out through Indian Country for California. To research the novel, Marius retraced the trail of the wagon trains with his family.

Marius' third novel, After the War, returned to Bourbon County in the post-World War I period. Drawing on the biographical experiences of his parents, the novel concerned a Greek immigrant who moves to Tennessee after fighting in the Great War for Belgium. The protagonist marries a local woman who becomes increasingly fundamentalist Christian as time goes on. He is also haunted by the ghosts of three friends who died in the war. Marius wanted to title the novel "Once in Arcadia," but his publisher believed that too few readers would understand the reference to the classical Greek refuge. Both Publishers Weekly and the New York Times named it one of the best novels of the year. The latter made it an "editor's choice," calling it "an old-fashioned blockbuster, richly packed with characters" and its reviewer, Robert Ward, wrote that the novel "moved me, made me laugh out loud, broke my heart."

Marius completed his last and perhaps most autobiographical novel, An Affair of Honor, several months before his death. It was published posthumously in 2001. Set in Bourbon County in 1953, the novel examines the post-World War II transition of the South through the prism of a young reporter, the son of the Greek immigrant hero of "After the War", who witnesses a man kill his unfaithful wife according to the "code of the hills", and the resulting murder trial.