Welcome to Stanley’s Tome on the Range
Tome, tome on the range,
Where the adverbs and the similes roam,
And seldom is heard
A disheartening word,
And Roget’s will be open all day.
David Stanley grew up in a Catholic orphanage near Pittsburgh, and imaginative storytelling helped him survive his youth. He was in the Marines for four years, then spent the next twenty years traveling the country working a variety of jobs such as carnival hand, prospector, lumber-jack, carpenter, bicycle messenger and camp caretaker. Interspersed were extensive bicycle tours that took him across Arizona and up the northwestern coast, and wilderness backpacking trips to such places as Superstition Mountain and Grand Canyon. He has also worked as a substitute teacher and spent several years as a volunteer tutor in elementary after-school programs. Always an avid reader and thinker, his life and travels have brought him into contact with a variety of characters and situations, from which he has extrapolated an extensive array of dramatic fiction and a philosophical work, The Cybernetic Indian: A Case for Secular Morality. David currently resides with his wife in San Antonio, Texas.
AGGIE BRAGA: An American Fable, is a sprawling epic which includes a true cross-section of American types in its forty-two major and as many minor characters. It moves from an Arkansas cotton plantation in the mid 1920’s to New York City, Chicago, Hollywood, a small town in northwest Oklahoma, a farm in the Missouri boot, back to Arkansas, and ends in northern California several decades after it began.
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The heroine is the beautiful young daughter of sharecroppers whose childhood sweetheart is the plantation owner’s son. They both find fleeting fame along with tragic disappointment after fleeing the sharecropper rebellion that has taken both their fathers’ lives.
Class, race, spirituality, politics, small-town bootleggers, big-city gangsters, redemption, transformation, sex and murder are all found in this finely-wrought exploration of American life as these two pursue their dreams to their ultimate conclusions.