Publisher's Synopsis
When George Canaris, a writing professor on the verge of forced retirement at a small college in Ohio, is killed by a hit-and-run driver, he is the first faculty member in half a century whose death merits an obituary in The New York Times. 'A writer, a critic, a professor, a campus legend and a national figure, the very embodiment of the liberal arts,' says the paper. And a mystery. 'Compared to Faulkner and Dos Passos at the start of his career,' the Times observes, 'in the end he resembled Harper Lee.' With a book listed among the one hundred greatest novels of all time, decades now separating him from the hefty advance taken on his next book, The Beast, and not a page to show of it, Canaris is an enigma. Inevitably, speculation grows that the book was a myth, a lie, a joke.
