AMERICAN SPIRIT
a novel
ISBN 1-60145-031-1
Academy Press Ca Available through Amazon.com,
Barnes&Noble.com, and local bookstores

Literary fiction, set in Pinal County, AZ, in 1878.

Genuine Americana settings and people braided with traditions of European letters back to the Greeks yields one outcome at least: AMERICAN SPIRIT. This novel reinterprets the world of human experience and of spirit through the perspectives of an Everyman ' Mort Lewis -- in the Arizona Territory of 1878. Mort's life was unexceptional for his times, until one morning he awoke in a jail-cell charged with a capital crime which he didn't know whether he committed or not.

AMERICAN SPIRIT tells the story of the three days which followed on that awakening, days in which he was brought to trial in a court of law but in which he of necessity also came to reevaluate his whole life ' a Missouri childhood shadowed by the death of his mother, Union cavalry service during the Civil War, a lost love and a lost life in post-war Kansas, a rootless drifting westward thereafter. Sensing and exploring a connection between his present circumstances and his prior life history, sensing meaning, Mort grows stronger and more self-confident. Accepting responsibility for his life, and for his own prospective and inevitable death, comforts him but discomforts those around him. In the end, by making both his life and death his own, Mort Lewis hopefully leaves the reader optimistic that there is meaning in life for each of us to discover or to ascribe, and better prospects ahead, whatever our present life's course.

Readers interested in the author, John Janda, or the European literary roots of the novel, will find information on both at www.ArizonaTerritory-1878.com A 4 CD audio book version of American Spirit is nearing completion and will also be made available through the web site.



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