This Side of Glory

A dramatic love story set amid the changing world of early twentieth-century Louisiana from the New York Times–bestselling author.

In 1912, Eleanor Upjohn sits with her father near a work camp, overseeing the construction of a levee on the Mississippi. In a region shattered by war, levees mean stability and prosperity. While Eleanor is a modern woman—practical, impatient, and ready for the future—she cannot help but fall for a man still steeped in the ways of the Old South.
 
Kester Larne is the heir to Ardeith, a sprawling Louisiana plantation whose glory days are long behind it, and he sweeps Eleanor off her feet. Only after they marry does she learn that Ardeith is mortgaged to the hilt and she will need every ounce of her ingenuity to save it . . . and her marriage.
 
This is the third novel in Gwen Bristow’s Plantation Trilogy, which also includes Deep Summer and The Handsome Road.
 
“A good story . . . An interesting psychological conflict . . . [And] there is a great deal more to it than that.” —TheNew York Times
 

Gwen Bristow (1903–1980), the author of seven bestselling historical novels that bring to life momentous events in American history, such as the siege of Charleston during the American Revolution (Celia Garth) and the great California gold rush (Calico Palace), was born in South Carolina, where the Bristow family had settled in the seventeenth century. After graduating from Judson College in Alabama and attending the Columbia School of Journalism, Bristow worked as a reporter for New Orleans’ Times-Picayune from 1925 to 1934. Through her husband, screenwriter Bruce Manning, she developed an interest in longer forms of writing—novels and screenplays.

After Bristow moved to Hollywood, her literary career took off with the publication of Deep Summer, the first novel in a trilogy of Louisiana-set historical novels, which also includes The Handsome Road and This Side of Glory. Bristow continued to write about the American South and explored the settling of the American West in her bestselling novels Jubilee Trail, which was made into a film in 1954, and in her only work of nonfiction, Golden Dreams. Her novel Tomorrow Is Forever also became a film, starring Claudette Colbert, Orson Welles, and Natalie Wood, in 1946.