Berry Fleming: 12 books

They meet by chance on a Georgia road: William Wesley Johns, a middle-aged novelist with a manuscript to mail, and the girl with two fiddle cases who hitches a ride. In a lonesome spot the fan belt breaks, so Johns and the girl, Jo, who is as independent as a bird and as spontaneously musical, set...

While Berry Fleming’s interest in history has produced two books of non-fiction, one of which dealt with the Civil War (Autobiography of a City in Arms), The Affair at Honey Hill marks the first time he has used the Civil War as a setting for any of his novels. The story is presented through the...

This comic third novel in our Berry Fleming series centers on Lucinda, a local girl-makes-good, who returns on her psychoanalyst’s suggestion to Fredricksville, Georgia, in order to “find herself.” A successful author and playwright in New York City, she poses a distinct problem for the residents...

Originally published in 1938 by Harcourt, Brace, this tale of people who migrate to New York City in search of careers and fulfillment was the first work that brought Berry Fleming to national prominence as a novelist.

Bob Otis, an unmarketable author who is just starting his own publishing company in order to get his latest novels in print, is abruptly sidetracked when a relative, so distant that Otis doesn’t even place him, phones from Chicago with a request: his father, who has just died, wishes to be buried...

Captain Bennett’s Folly is a direct descendant of Fleming’s earlier comic novels, Colonel Effingham's Raid and Lucinderella. Like them, there is a narrator—in this case Walker Williams—who reports an adventure replete with rogues and innocents, while making an artful, funny and wistful case...

Who Dwelt by a Churchyard centers around an old man about to move, who—as he sits before a fireplace throwing ancient photographs upon the flames—recalls the major events in his life. It is a stunning, moving work, written with great economy, and yet so richly textured that it gives one a feeling...

Waiting at the airport of a Caribbean island for his homeward bound plane, Edward Ray—the bookman of the title—reflects on this week, which has changed his life. First, there was the cargo ship voyage to San Juan de Pinos, a journey shared by an odd assortment of fellow passengers whose lives...

The fictional town of Georgetown, Alabama, is home to a sweeping cast of characters whose lives intertwine during a sweltering and languid summer. 

Satire at its gentlest and best and humor at its richest mark this story of a blustery retired military officer who mounts his final campaign against those self-appointed and elected guardians of the public good (and the taxpayer’s purse strings) who are guilty of the sort of petty graft and private enrichment endemic in the mythical, sleepy, southern town of Fredricksville, Georgia.

This sprawling novel concerns the lives of two generations in one family; of their loves both licit and illicit, of their work, and of their personal triumphs and tragedies. It is a story, at first, about the three Woodruff brothers: Peter, a businessman, Leonard, an artist, and Ike, an attorney and...

Set in eastern Long Island, in an area reminiscent of the Hamptons, it is a tale about a wedding party: the bride and groom each apprehensive, but for different reasons. On the scene are a former lover of the bride’s who makes a sudden appearance and a young swain who is equally taken with the bride-to-be.