About this item
A cinematic Reconstruction-era drama of violence and fraught moral reckoningIn Dawson's Fall, a novel based on the lives of Roxana Robinson's great-grandparents, we see America at its most fragile, fraught, and malleable. Set in 1889, in Charleston, South Carolina, Robinson's tale weaves her family's journal entries and letters with a novelist's narrative grace, and spans the life of her tragic hero, Frank Dawson, as he attempts to navigate the country's new political, social, and moral landscape.Dawson, a man of fierce opinions, came to this country as a young Englishman to fight for the Confederacy in a war he understood as a conflict over states' rights. He later became the editor of the Charleston News and Courier, finding a platform of real influence in the editorial column and emerging as a voice of the New South.
About the Author
Roxana Robinson is the author of nine books: five novels, three story collections, and the biography of Georgia O'Keeffe. Four of these were New York Times Notable Books. Robinson was born in Kentucky, but grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. She attended Bennington College and graduated from the University of Michigan. She worked in the art world, specializing in the field of American painting, before she began writing full-time. Her most recent novel, Sparta, won the James Webb Award for Distinguished Fiction from the USMC Heritage Foundation. Her previous novel, Cost, received the Fiction Award from the Maine Publishers and Writers Association. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper's, Tin House, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for the NBCC Balakian Award for Criticism and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She teaches at Hunter College, is a former member of the board of PEN, and is currently the President of the Authors Guild.
