A PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST WINNER OF THE HEARTLAND PRIZE FOR FICTION “Stunning.”— USA Today “A master American novelist.” — Vanity Fair Set in Eisenhower-era Chicago, An Unfinished Season brilliantly evokes a city, an epoch, and a shift in ideals through the closely observed story of nineteen-year-old Wilson Ravan. In his summer before college, Wils finds himself straddling three worlds: the working-class newsroom where he's landed a coveted job as a rookie reporter, the whirl of glittering North Shore debutante parties where he spends his nights, and the growing cold war between his parents at home. With unparalleled grace, Ward Just brings Wils's circle to radiant life. Through his finely wrought portraits of a father and son, young lovers, and newsroom dramas, Just also stirringly depicts an American political era. "One of Just's best works: stuffed with surprises, sparkling with insights." Kirkus Reviews, Starred “He steeps his sentences in the rhythms of 1950s jazz….the result is Just’s most trenchant read to date…” The Village Voice WARD JUST (1935-2019) was the author of nineteen novels, including  Exiles in the Garden, Forgetfulness, the National Book Award finalist Echo House, A Dangerous Friend, winner of the Cooper Prize for fiction from the Society of American Historians, and An Unfinished Season, winner of the Chicago Tribune Heartland Award and a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize. An Unfinished Season By Ward Just Mariner Books Copyright © 2005 Ward Just All right reserved. ISBN: 9780618568284 Chapter 1 The winter of the year my father carried a gun for his own protection was the coldest on record in Chicago. The winter went on and on, blizzard following blizzard, each day gray with a ?erce arctic wind. The canyons of the Loop were deserted, empty as any wasteland, the lake an unquiet pile of ice beyond. Trains failed, water pipes cracked, all northern Illinois was locked in, the air as brittle as a razorblade. The newspaper story that had everyone talking was the account of a young colored woman found frozen solid in an alley on the South Side and taken at once to the city morgue, where an alert doctor discovered the faintest of heartbeats. She was revived, thawed as you would thaw a frozen piece of meat, and in the course of the subsequent examination was found to have so much gin in her veins that—"Jeez, it was like she had swallowed antifreeze," the doctor said. Religious leaders, ignoring the lurid details in the papers, declared her survival a miracle. She was a young woman touched by the hand of the son of God. Jesus had visited Chicago and saved the humblest and most destitute of his creatures, praise the Lord. Happened all the time when I was a boy, my father said. Some poor bastard wandered away, got lost, passed out, froze to death. Happened to our neighbor. They didn"t ?nd him for a week. We didn"t have morgues out here. And the doctor was twenty miles away. My father was born on a farm on the prairie north of Chicago and insisted that this winter was nothing compared to the winters he had endured as a boy, interminable winters when the snow reached to the eaves of the roof; and when the western wind from the plains blew away the snow, the icicles remained, icicles as thick as your arm. My father had an imaginative memory stacked with stories and often different versions of the same story. One time he had the wind howling like wolves and another time wolves howling like the wind. When he told his stories, my mother always rolled her eyes and winked at me. We lived in his family"s homestead, except now it had nine large rooms instead of six small ones, and where the barn had stood, an emerald lawn with oval ?ower beds and a great oak so broad two men could not reach their arms around it. The house was on the grounds of a newly minted golf club in a township that was unincorporated but known informally as Quarterday, meaning that in the previous century it took a quarter of a day to reach Half Day, itself half a day"s ride to Chicago. Tell someone from the North Shore that you lived in Quarterday and you got a condescending smile because to the suburban gentry it was nowheresville, a common ?atland of family farms and a few estates and the newly minted golf club, a crossroads with a drugstore, a market, and a gas station, the unfashionable western point of a triangle whose eastern points were Lake Forest and Winnetka. What do people do out there anyhow? What do they see in it? The suburban gentry associated Quarterday with one-room schoolhouses, pheasant shooting in the corn- ?elds, hayrides in the moonlight, and the annual agricultural fair. Something unsettled about it, a place that never developed. There were rumors of gambling in the roadhouse down the highway from the club, the roadhouse owned and operated by Italian interests from Chicago. The sixth green of the golf course was visible from our terrace. Between the terrace and