WALLS RISE UP

Originally published in 1939 by Doubleday, Doran, this is George Sessions Perry's first novel -- which is to be republished with considerable backing. In the Saroyan -- Steinbeck tradition of benevolent bums, without the idealization that this is the beautiful life -- but making the most of it as the happy life, this is the story of Jimmy and Mike and Eddie -- their amoral and adventitious activities as they follow Jimmy's signs from the Higher Powers. How they move in on a dead man's shack on the Brason River (Southwest), use catfish as a bait for women and a barter for whisky, land a compensation check for their dead man -- and move on to new vistas of improvidence provide amusing sequences of likeable, loose characters.