An Hour Before Daylight

In an American story of enduring importance, Jimmy Carter recreates his Depression-era boyhood on a Georgia farm, before the civil rights movement that changed it and the country. In this powerful memoir, former President and bestselling author Jimmy Carter writes about the powerful rhythms of countryside and community in a sharecropping economy. He offers an unforgettable portrait of his father, a brilliant farmer and strict segregationist who treated black workers with his own brand of 'separate' respect and fairness; and his strong-willed and well-read mother, a nurse who cared for all in need. He describes the five other people who shaped his early life, only two of them white; his eccentric relatives; and the boyhood friends with whom he worked the farm and hunted with slingshots and boomerangs, but who could not attend the same school. Carter's clean and eloquent prose evokes a time when the cycles of life were predictable and simple and the rules were heart-breaking and complex. AN HOUR BEFORE DAYLIGHT is destined to stand with other timeless works of American literature.