Two teenage boys--one black sharecropper's son from Georgia and the other the son of a Jewish immigrant farmer from New York--battle hunger, danger, and racism on the rails, during the depths of the Great Depression and forge a lifelong friendship.

Boxcar Blues will take you on a decades long journey that you'll be glad you took. This is a moving story of two teenage boys, one a woman black sharecropper's son from Georgia and one the son of a Jewish immigrant farmer from New York, who battle hunger, danger, and racism on the rails, during the depths of the Great Depression and forge a lifelong friendship. Through the harrowing years of World War II and the decades beyond. . . through heartache, lost loves, success and danger. . . their bonds of friendship, forged during their travels in one of America's darkest era stand them in good stead. A tempered-steel toughness that men admire and women are drawn to and their hard-won survival instincts and road savvy take them far beyond the lives of boxcar vagrants-through the war years where they challenge the skies as U.S. pilots and through the post-war years to adventures in the frozen wilds of Alaska and in the hazardous skies over the scorching deserts of Mexico. This thrilling tale of friendship, adventure, and danger leads to a showdown in which they need every skill they learned on the road to defeat a determined nemesis from their vagabond past who is bent on violent revenge and upon their complete destruction. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Born and raised in northern Illinois, Jeff Egerton was seventeen and broke when he hopped a freight train to travel west. His journey on the road and on the rails lasted less than a year, but vivid memories of those adventurous times survive to this day. Jeff then enlisted and traveled to South Vietnam, courtesy of the US Marine Corps. Following a career in aviation, he began writing international crime novels. Lodged in the back of his mind, however, wasa novel about young men riding the rails across America. In Boxcar Blues Jeff Egerton has combined knowledge gained through his own experiences with his research of the era of the Great Depression - a time when thousands of young men traveled in boxcars out of necessity. Forging these strains into a narrative of two boys growing and learning to become men during the the racially charged history of mid-twentieth century America, he has created an emotionally charged story of coming of age, friendship, growth, and courage that is at by turns thrilling, appalling, fascinating, and inspiring, but which is always engaging and surprising. Drawing on traditions as disparate as John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, Alice Walker's The Color Purple, James Jone' From Here to Eternity, and James Michener's Texas, Jeff Egerton has created characters and a saga of America you won't soon forget. Jeff currently resides in Tucson with his wife, Diane.