The River Is Home [Paperback]

Award winning Florida novelist Patrick Smith's first novel, The River Is Home revolves around a Mississippi family's struggle to cope with changes in their rural environment. Poor in material possessions, Skeeter's kinfolk are rich in their appreciation of their beautiful natural surroundings. The river on which they live—with its food supply, steamboats, and floods—figures strongly in their lives as the source of life, change, and death. Though their life is a simple one, it's filled with friendship, loyalty, love, and compassion.

A native of Mendenhall, Mississippi, Patrick Smith earned both a B.A. and a masters degree in English from the University of Mississippi. He moved to Florida in 1966 and began writing the novels about Florida that would make bring him lifelong recognition: The River Is Home, The Beginning, Forever Island, Angel City, Allapattah, and A Land Remembered. Smith has been nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize: in 1973 for Forever Island, which was a 1974 selection of Readers Digest Condensed Books; in 1978 for Angel City, which was produced as a movie of the week for the CBS television network; and in 1984 for A Land Remembered, which was an Editors Choice selection of the New York Times Book Review. In the annual statewide Best of Florida poll conducted by Florida Monthly Magazine, A Land Remembered has been ranked #1 Best Florida Book eight times. In 1985 Smiths lifetime work was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1999 he was inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame, which is the highest cultural honor bestowed by the state of Florida. In May 2002 Smith was the recipient of the Florida Historical Societys Fay Schweim Award as the Greatest Living Floridian. The one-time-only award was established to honor the one individual who has contributed the most to Florida in recent history. Additionally, Smith earned the 2012 Florida Lifetime Achievement Award fol³J