Winner of the 1989 National Book AwardA classic tale of a man, a boat, and a storm, Spartina is the lyrical and compassionatestory of Dick Pierce, a commercial fisherman along the shores of Rhode Island'sNarragansett Bay. A kind, sensitive, family man, he is also prone to irascible outburstsagainst the people he must work for, now that he can no longer make his living from thesea.Pierce's one great passion, a fifty-foot fishing boat called Spartina, lies unfinished inhis back yard. Determined to get the funds he needs to buy her engine, he finds himselftaking a foolish, dangerous risk. But his real test comes when he must weather a storm atsea in order to keep his dream alive. Moving and poetic, Spartina is a masterly story ofone man's ongoing struggle to find his place in the world.

A young intellectual is called into active duty and receives a rude awakening to the realities of military service. An Ivy League graduate is pressed casually into Intelligence work and encounters himself mirrored in his new-found friend--a Russian spy. An arrogant professor finds himself unable to resist the unschooled energy of a spunky female student. A lonely apprentice at a New York law firm is flattered by the attentions of two mentors--one a senior partner, the other an enchantingly extravagant woman--whose sophistication make his own naivety painfully apparent. Each story in this luminous quartet explorers an emotional turning-point, either toward or away from self-knowledge--that moment when a young man of privilege suddenly finds his carefully nurtured superiority crumbling. In Casey's beautiful prose, the experiences of these solitary narrators resonate with remarkable power.