''The Green Age of Asher Witherow'' is the debut novel of

M. Allen Cunningham Mark Allen Cunningham is an American author based in Portland, Oregon. His first novel, '' The Green Age of Asher Witherow'', is the story of a young boy growing up in a California coal mining town in the 19th century. ''The Green Age of Asher ...

, published in 2004. It is the story of Asher Witherow, a boy born in the

coal mining Coal mining is the process of extracting coal from the ground. Coal is valued for its energy content and since the 1880s has been widely used to generate electricity. Steel and cement industries use coal as a fuel for extraction of iron from ...

town of Nortonville, California in 1863. The story is framed as a memoir, penned by the elderly Witherow in the spring of 1950, long after the book's events occurred, and many years after the community of Nortonville ceased to exist. Witherow, a mysterious and haunted old man of 86, shares the troubling story of his life from birth to age 20, when he left Nortonville. Central to the tale is the image of the 4,000 foot Mount Diablo, which assumes a symbolic presence for Witherow. The book's title is inspired by the poem " The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower" by

Dylan Thomas Dylan Marlais Thomas (27 October 1914 – 9 November 1953) was a Welsh poet and writer whose works include the poems "Do not go gentle into that good night" and "And death shall have no dominion", as well as the "play for voices" ''Under ...

, which begins, "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees / Is my destroyer." The poem's central themes of mortality, biological decay, and ecological interdependence are explored in the novel.

References

External links

*http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2004winter/witherow.shtml
Official Author Website
2004 American novels Novels set in California Contra Costa County, California 2004 debut novels {{2000s-hist-novel-stub

See also

References

External links