Product Description
If the preacher's wife's petticoat showed, the ladies would make the talk last a week. But on July 5, 1906, things took a scandalous turn. That was the day E. Rucker Blakeslee, proprietor of the general store and barely three weeks a widower, eloped with Miss Love Simpson—a woman half his age and, worse yet, a Yankee! On that day, fourteen-year-old Will Tweedy's adventures began and an unimpeachably pious, deliciously irreverent town came to life. Not since
To Kill A Mockingbird has a novel so deftly captured the subtle crosscurrents of small-town Southern life. Olive Ann Burns classic bestseller brings to vivid life an era that will never exist again, exploring timeless issues of love, death, coming of age, and the ties that bind families and generations.

From the Trade Paperback edition.
About the Author
Olive Ann Burns was a writer for all of her professional life, but she completed only one book before her death in 1990. That book,
Cold Sassy Tree, has become a phenomenon since its publication in 1984, selling over one million copies worldwide and still going strong. The author was born in Banks County, Georgia on July 17, 1924, on land originally farmed by her great-great-grandfather. She was the youngest of four children. She died on July 4, 1990. Her unfinished sequel to
Cold Sassy Tree, entitled
Leaving Cold Sassy, was published after her death.

Olive Ann once told an interviewer, "It has been said that growing up in the South and becoming a writer is like spending your life riding in a wagon, seated in a chair that is always facing backwards. I don't face life looking backwards, but I have written about past times and past people. To write
Cold Sassy Tree, I interviewed parents, aunts, and old cousins, and I took down what they said in their own words, using the rhythms of their own speech. What I was after was not just names and dates. I wanted stories and details that would bring the dead to life."

Although Olive Ann Burns' literary output was limited to two works, her colorful characters, detail-driven use of setting, and humor-laced plots endeared her to readers of all ages. In large part because she was inspired by what she knew best—the idiosyncricies of her own family history—Burns was able to bring a region and an era to life.

From the Trade Paperback edition.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One
Three weeks after Granny Blakeslee died, Grandpa came to our house for his early morning snort of whiskey, as usual, and said to me, "Will Tweedy? Go find yore mama, then run up to yore Aunt Loma's and tell her I said git on down here. I got something to say. And I ain't a-go'n say it but once't."
"Yessir."
"Make haste, son. I got to git on to the store."
Mama made me wait till she pinned the black mourning band for Granny on my shirt sleeve. Then I was off. Any time Grandpa had something to say, it was something you couldn't wait to hear.
That was eight years ago on a Thursday morning, when Grandpa Blakeslee was fifty-nine and I was fourteen. The date was July 5, 1906. I know because Grandpa put it down in the family Bible, and also Toddy Hughes wrote up for the Atlanta paper what happened to me on the train trestle that day and I still have the clipping. Besides that, I remember it was right after our July the Fourth celebration--the first one held in Cold Sassy, Georgia, since the War Between the States.
July 5, 1906, was three months after the big earthquake in San Francisco and about two months after a stranger drove through Cold Sassy in a Pope-Waverley electric automobile that got stalled trying to cross the railroad tracks. I pushed it up the incline and the man let me ride as far as the Athens highway.
July 5, 1906, was a year after my great-grandmother on the Tweedy side died for the second and last time out in Banks County. It was six months after my best friend, Bluford Jackson, got firecrackers for Christmas and bu