San Antonio College Library

A forbidden romance between a half-breed and a white woman, set in Texas at the turn of the century. The hero is Reuben Sweetbitter, the son of a white father and an Indian mother. When he begins dating Martha Clarke, the daughter of a lawyer, he is threatened with lynching and the couple flee to another town, but the forces of racial purity pursue them. This is one tale where love does not conquer all. By the author of Five Pears or Peaches.

"The half-blood--half Indian, half white--is a frequent figure in the popular fiction of nineteenth-century America, for he (or sometimes she) served to symbolize many of the conflicting cultural values with which American society was then wrestling. In literature, as in real life the half-blood was a product of the frontier, embodying the conflict between wilderness and civilization that haunted and stirred the American imagination. What was his...