Everybody loved Jesse. Boys wanted to be him—or beat him—and girls wanted to be with him. In California’s Central Valley, where fist fighting was a noble sport and drinking and sex were rites of passage for teenagers, Jesse was the toughest kid in the valley. Until he was murdered by his best friend.
Jesse’s Ghost is a powerful novel about a man haunted by the crime he committed decades ago and the realization that the ghosts of his past will always haunt him. These are the sons and daughters of the people portrayed in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath—Dust Bowl descendants who came of age when toughness, hard work, and loyalty defined what it meant to be a man in America.
Through the chaos that surrounded him, the risks he took, and despite the mistakes he made, Jesse pursued the American Dream. His friend Sonny, in the moving, funny, and tragic story he narrates in Jesse’s Ghost, seeks a new life and redemption.
Frank Bergon grew up on a ranch in Madera County in California’s San Joaquin Valley. After attending elementary school at St. Joachim School in Madera and high school at Bellarmine in San Jose, he received a B.A. in English at Boston College, attended Stanford University as a Wallace Stegner Fellow, and completed a Ph.D. in English and American literature at Harvard University. He is the author of the novels Wild Game, The Temptations of St. Ed & Brother S, and Shoshone Mike. He has taught at the University of Washington and for many years at Vassar College.
