John Jakes

In the late nineteenth century, Newport, Rhode Island, was a cauldron of money, excess, and unapologetic greed, where reputations were made and lost in a whirlwind of parties and fancied slights. But amid the glamour of yacht races, tennis matches, and costume balls raged undeclared class warfare, scandalous doings, even madness. In 1893, railroad mogul Sam Driver, one of the few surviving robber barons of the lawless years after the Civil War, knocks...

The first volume of John Jakes's acclaimed and sweeping saga about a friendship threatened by the divisions of the Civil War In the years leading up to the Civil War, one enduring friendship embodies the tensions of a nation. Orry Main from South Carolina and George Hazard from Pennsylvania forge a lasting bond while training at the United States Military Academy at West Point. Together they fight in the Mexican-American War, but their closeness is...

Sherman's army marches from Atlanta to the sea, with Savannah in its path. The Lester ladies--attractive widowed Sara and her feisty twelve-year-old daughter Hattie--struggle to save the family rice plantation. Hattie and the general find themselves on a collision course that will astonish both of them when Sherman offers the city to Lincoln as "a Christmas gift."

Relates the experiences of the Texas woman who, along with her baby, survived the 1836 massacre at the Alamo.