The final work from one of America's most beloved authors and an instant classic, TAPS takes readers on one last fictional journey to Willie Morris's South and spins a tender, powerful, very American story about the vanishing beauty of a charmed way of life and the fleeting boyhood of a young man coming of age in a time of war. In Fisk’s Landing, Mississippi, at the dawn of the Korean War, sixteen-year-old Swayze Barksdale is suddenly called to an unexpected duty - playing "Taps" at the gravesides of the town’s young casualties sent home from the front. Gradually, Swayze begins to pace his life around these all too frequent funerals, where his horn sounds the tragic note of the times. At turns funny, at turns poignant, TAPS abounds with colorful characters and yet "sings and sighs . . . with a kind of minor key wistfulness" (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette) as Swayze learns what it means to be a patriot, a son, a lover, a friend, a man.

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In a final work by the author of My Dog Skip, sixteen-year-old Mississippi boy Swayze Barksdale is called upon to play "Taps" at the funerals of his neighborhood's young Korean War casualties and comes into a more mature understanding of friendship, love,

Taps

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By Willie Morris

Mariner Books

Copyright © 2002 Willie Morris
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0618219021

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Excerpt

Luke Cartwright became for me a harbinger of death in that year. It
was an ambient evening of early summer when he first came by my house.
My mother was at a bridge tournament at the country club and would be
late, and I was relishing the solitude from her injunctions. Earlier
it had rained, and the trees arched in shadowy silhouettes, darkly
green now before the coming of the heat, dripping with moisture in the
cooling breeze. The hills began only a hundred yards from the house,
and the whole earth sang with crickets and other nocturnal things.
Soon the DDT truck came by, spraying for the season"s first
mosquitoes, known and acknowledged as the largest and most aggressive
in Christendom, or so we believed.
I heard the wheeze of a motor at the front curb. I looked up
and saw Luke Cartwright stepping out of his red pickup truck with its
high boxed rectangular cabin and a black cat sprawled on his
dashboard. I stood to greet him. He was in khaki trousers and a
metallic blue sports shirt that glowed under the streetlamp. From a
few feet away a frog jumped in an arc and landed with a whish.
"Ain"t you a little old to be barefoot in your front yard in
the middle of the night? How old are you, anyway?"
"Sixteen, almost."
"That"s old enough."
I had never thought of it that way, if indeed I had
considered it at all. Does the only child — the solitary son of a
widowed and indomitable mother fraught with an inordinate propensity
for intrusion — dwell on age? Especially when she teaches tap dancing?
Survival, perhaps, although I would not have used the word then — nor
escape nor improvisation nor even loneliness. Old enough for what?
"I hear you play the trumpet in the band. And you"re good."
"Only pretty good," I replied.
"Can you play "Taps"?"

Copyright © 2001 by JoAnne Prichard Morris and David Rae Morris

Continues...

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Excerpted from Taps by Willie Morris Copyright © 2002 by Willie Morris. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Willie Morris is the author of North Toward Home, New York Days, My Dog Skip, My Cat Spit McGee, and numerous other works of fiction and nonfiction. As the imaginative and creative editor of Harper’s Magazine in the 1960s, he published such writers as William Styron, Gay Talese, David Halberstam, and Norman Mailer, and he was a major influence in changing our postwar literary and journalistic history. He died in August 1999 at the age of sixty-four.