Children of Strangers Paperback - 2011

Lyle Saxon's only novel vividly captures the lives of the people who inhabit the Louisiana Cane River plantation community, which served as a crucible for race relations in the early twentieth century. The story revolves around Famie, a Creole girl whose ancestors-free people of color-rivaled the white planters in wealth and culture.

With the end of slavery, Famie is an outcast, scorned by the whites because of her mixed heritage and unwilling to associate with the sharecroppers who are descendants of slaves. An illicit love affair with a white outlaw leaves Famie with a son, Joel. Her dream is for Joel to someday prosper in white society. Famie's struggle to survive within a rigid caste system defined by race and class clearly distinguishes this neglected masterpiece of American fiction.

Lyle Saxon (1891-1946) ranks among Louisiana's most outstanding writers. He is also the author of Lafitte the Pirate, Fabulous New Orleans, Old Louisiana, Father Mississippi: The Story of the Great Flood of 1927, and The Friends of Joe Gilmore and coauthor of Gumbo Ya-Ya: Folk Tales of Louisiana. All are published by Pelican.

A foreword by Chance Harvey has been included in this new edition. While a student at Tulane University, Harvey came across a collection of letters addressed to Saxon that became the focus of her dissertation on him, for which she won the John T. Monroe Fellowship for Dissertation Research. She has published her research as The Life and Selected Letters of Lyle Saxon with Pelican.