Feels Like Rain — Edward Anderson

FEELS LIKE RAIN is the largest collection of Edward Anderson's fiction and true crime writing ever assembled. For a period of about three years Edward Anderson's writing garnered the attention of the highest literary circles. He quickly moved from pulp fiction to literature with a natural sort of ease, a self-assurance that can only be called brilliant. His authentic stories of dustbowl drifters captured the times in perfect pitch. He was the inheritor of London, brethren to Steinbeck. His work appeared side by side with Faulkner, Wolfe and Katherine Ann Porter. He was compared to Hemmingway by literary critics of the day and was lured by Hollywood like so many other hot talents. His voice was a proletariat spark, an igniter for the masses. Anderson presumed to speak for his generation, the Starvation Army whose faces were gaunt as skulls and whose ribcages, when stripped of their tattered coverings, looked like xylophones hung from boney rails. Just as he found his voice, his narrative, his landscape and the people who would populate it, his artistic output inexplicably fizzled. It was as if all the creative juices had been squeezed out of him. Most of the work he left behind can be found in this single volume, It Feels Like Rain. Today Anderson is primarily remembered as a crime writer (the great Raymond Chandler considered Thieves Like Us the best bandit novel ever written,) but it is time to give him his due and afford him his proper place in the halls of American literature. Edward Anderson's earthy, naturalistic style, his humanist approach and focus on social issues, places him the company of our finest writers. Introduction by Jonathan Eeds. FEELS LIKE RAIN is illustrated with artwork and photographs evocative of the 1930's.