I read this book years ago not long after it came out. At the time I was studying history at Tennessee and happened to have Richard Marius for a couple of classes. He's dead now, of cancer. He was a gifted man; I was surprised that he didn't stay with novels, but I think expository writing was more his style. After Bound for the Promised Land, the sequel to The Coming of Rain, he gave up writing fiction, and went on to his biography of Thomas More. I do wonder how he would have turned out if he had stayed with fiction. The book was fairly good for a first novel. And I suspect Marius was working out for himself the old problem of country-boy-who-grows-up-to-be-educated-and ambivalence-about-roots. ( )

3359. The Coming of Rain, by Richard Marius (read 14 Oct 2000) This is a 1969 novel laid in Bourbonville, Tenn., in 1885, and is an intricately plotted account of people affected by the Civil War. I doubt this is a great book, and it is not complimentary to the people of Tennessee of the time. The plot is far-fetched and the characters seem non-real. I am not sure what moved me to read this book. After I read it I learned it won the Friends of American Writers Award for best first novel in 1969. Anyway, this shows I do so read fiction. ( )