The Cloud and the Fire is a revolutionary work. Political, social, timely, and most importantly”human. As a book, it is a riveting epic, and not only because of the scope of the story, but because of the ideas and characters who inhabit the story. Set during the Civil War in California, the book features an actual conspiracy where a clandestine group known as the Knights of the Golden Circle, who were the forerunners of the Ku Klux Klan, attempted to turn California into an apartheid state, separate from the Union. California, at the time, was wealthier than the Union and a place of unrivalled possibility and unmatched hatreds.

A CHILD WENT FORTH follows thirteen year old Charlie Griffin's evolvement from boyhood to manhood in the summer of 1855 as he carries money from Brooklyn to Missouri to give it to the abolitionist leaders there. All the while he is being hunted by a ferocious crew of adversaries. It is an entirely new look at the era, at slavery, racism, political and social corruptions and the cast of people in the novel are an illustrious roll call of characters from the real to the reimagined. From Walt Whitman to P.T. Barnum, to the Brooklyn evangelist and abolitionist Ward Beecher, brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe. The infamous and ghostlike undertaker and anti-slavery insurrectionist Erastus Eels. The millionaire gunfighter and freestater Butler Philips to his dashing and Oxford educated counterpart, the assassin Dixie Jack. And then there is Annie Pie, the heroine of the story, who at thirteen is brave beyond her years, and it is left to her to save Charlie Griffin, the boy she has come to love.

A novel about the American theatre of the 1850s. The New York theatre of that era was the Hollywood of its day, with all its trademark insanities. It was everything that was America. Its beauty and excitement, its rise and fall of personalities, its joys and desperations, selfish corruptions and violence. Even its hatred and racism. Enter Colonel Tearwood's American Theatre Company. Helmed by actor Nathanial Luck and playwright Robert Harrison, it revolutionizes the theatre of the times by bringing daily life to the stage: Love affairs, social corruption, political intrigue, violence and death grip the audience as backstage the players' fortunes rise and fall and rise again in an all too human play. There's dashing Nathaniel Luck, hunted for the Pickwick Paper murders; beautiful Genevieve Wells, a con artist and swindler; Rosina Swain, aspiring actress in search of a father; and Robert Harrison, scion of a wealthy family, who was burned and disfigured in the infamous Wall Street fire, and turns the ruins of his body into art. How beautiful they were...