The Mountaintop is Peter Delacorte's fifth novel. Its predecessor, Time on My Hands, was shortlisted for the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award. The Mountaintop takes place primarily during the first four days of April, 1968, a period that begins with LBJ's announcement not to seek reelection and ends with Martin Luther King's assassination. Those events loom in the background, as do the Vietnam War and the schism in the Civil Rights Movement. The lives of the book's five young narrators, meanwhile, intersect and collide in ways that reflect the tumult, the excitement, and the tragedy of the time. A charismatic, Kennedyesque young achiever travels to Memphis for the nascent RFK presidential campaign, leaving his live-in girlfriend in Manhattan as he romances a beautiful college girl, who is patrician, ambitious, and black. A Columbia film student cuts classes in favor of psychedelic drugs, meets up with some larcenous Puerto Ricans, steals a car, and inadvertently commits a murder. A commentator at a leading-edge FM rock station takes time off from work for his draft physical, which he hopes to fail with chemical assistance, but a run-in with a malevolent non-com puts him on the fast track to Vietnam. Two young women, co-workers at a bilingual kindergarten in East Harlem, deal in their respective ways with the sexual politics of the time. Everything comes to a head on April 4, in Memphis and New York, in black and white, when the world is suddenly changed by an assassin's bullet at the Lorraine Motel.
About the Author: Peter Delacorte grew up in New York City, where his grandfather was a publisher and his father an editor. Neither had much respect for writers, so Delacorte decided to be one. At Princeton University he won the F. Scott Fitzgerald Prize for Creative Writing. He spent ten years as a pop journalist, the main benefit of which was getting plenty of free records, then got serious and wrote his first novel, Games of Chance, which was adored by critics but fell a few hundred slots short of the best-seller list. His second novel, Levantine, a political thriller set in the Middle East, was also a critical favorite, and unaccountably a big hit in Japan. Delacorte's third novel, Hero of the Revolution, is stored in a warehouse because its publisher went out of business moments before its release date and legal problems ensued. Number four was the charm. Time on My Hands got raves from the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the San Franciso Chronicle, and numerous other publications. The tale of a man who travels back in time (to 1938) to alter the career of b-movie actor Ronald Reagan, Time was one of five books shortlisted for Britain's Arthur C. Clarke Award. The Mountaintop is novel number five. Peter Delacorte lives in San Francisco with his wife, Bonnie, and their dog, an ineffably cute rescue spaniel mix named Twiggy.