A young boy, an old man, and the outlaw who has unknowingly killed the boy's father, all try to resist the changes brought about during the period between the wars

An American classic, The Orchard Keeper is the first novel by one of America's finest, most celebrated novelists.  Set is a small, remote community in rural Tennessee in the years between the two world wars, it tells of John Wesley Rattner, a young boy, and Marion Sylder, an outlaw and bootlegger who, unbeknownst to either of them, has killed the boy's father.  Together with Rattner's Uncle Ather, who belongs to a former age in his communion with nature and his stoic independence, they enact a drama that seems born of the land itself.  All three are heroes of an intense and compelling celebration of values lost to time and industrialization.