To Look and Pass — Taylor Caldwell

If Dan Hendricks had been born thirty or so years later, things would not have happened as they did. In a restless and mobile nation he could have escaped from the past, assumed another identity. But in the close-knit community of South Kenton at the turn of the century, he could not escape. -- From his earliest years, Dan seemed marked out by fate as one of its victims. In the eyes of the small respectable American town he was an outcast, a social misfit. His mother was dead; his father was only a blacksmith and , what was worse, a drunkard, and the two of them lived in a two-room shack behind the smithy. When Dan fell in love, it was with a woman twenty-two years older than him; when he got married, it was to a woman who hated him and wanted to make him suffer, and who succeeded - even after her death.

This is the poignant story of a man who chose to do more than to look and pass'; a man who was good, honorable and high of heart, but whose end was lonely and tragic.