FOMITE
The Half Gods is a revolutionary novel, a literary work of the first importance, exploring the man, Daniel Leflore, his diverse worlds, the life path he has traversed, and the destiny that lies before him and his country. Through Leflore’s exploration of self, family, and society runs the "deepest fiction”, a search for meaning — personal and world-encompassing. To this Fomite edition is added “Prodigal Father”, an unfinished fragment of the third volume of his intended trilogy to be called The Third Kingdom.
The Married Land, a work of high-seriousness, lusty humor, and a passion for life, tells the story of Daniel Byrne’s return home to Greenville Mississippi where he finds a welter of confusion. As he struggles to restore it to some order, he faces the question of how the contradictions he finds — family unravellings, polarities of North and South, black and white, rich and poor — could have formed a time-defying union, a center in which opposites blend together in an anatomy of love.
About the Author
Charles G. Bell (1916-2010) was a maverick polymath, a poet, scientist, teacher, translator, and novelist. He majored in physics at the University of Virginia, and, at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, received degrees in English. He taught at Princeton, the University of Chicago, and St. John's College, for which he helped develop its current Great Books program.
Like that of many of the great thinker-teachers, several of Charles Bell’s own writings are unpublished, or have gone out of print. With the republication of his two novels, The Married Land (1962), and The Half-Gods (1968), Fomite hopes to assert his proper importance in American literature.
