NEWPORT RISING --Historical Novel by prize-winning author John Rolfe Gardiner Pre-Revolutionary Newport, Rhode Island, thriving nest of the American slave trade, a virtual city-state of multiple faiths, independent traders and craftsmen, boasted a perfect harbor for its tariff-flouting commercial armada. It was thus a prime target for British invasion and occupation. Here, Cotton Palmer, journeyman printer and political essayist cuts a dangerous path between colonists who might shoot him and the British who hope to hang him. Palmer and the abolitionist lady-friend who won't be his wife are subjects of censure in the precariously-balanced town, where religious tolerance and the slave trade, freedom of conscience and bondage, side by side, sow the seeds of our American civil history. The novel delves into the pliable mind of this 18th Century hub where the war's outcome will turn many friends of England, and fence-sitters, into life-long patriots. John Rolfe Gardiner is the author of five previous novels and three story collections. He is recipient of a National Endowment grant, winner of the Lila Wallace award and has appeared in The New Yorker, American Scholar, American Short Fiction, Ontario Review, Oxford American, O Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories, the Pushcart Prize volume, and many other periodicals and anthologies.
About the Author: John Rolfe Gardiner was born in New York City in 1936. He grew up in the Washington, D.C. suburbs of Northern Virginia during World War II. Educated at the Sidwell Friends School in Washington, and Amherst College, he graduated with a B.A degree in English. He served in Yorkshire England in the Army Security Agency, then worked as a reporter and editor at Broadcasting and Television Magazines in New York and Washington. Gardiner's first novel, Great Dream From Heaven for which he was named a member of the Mark Twain Society was published in 1974. An early recipient of a National Endowment writer's grant and a winner of the Lila Wallace award for fiction, he is the author of six novels and three story collections. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, American Scholar, American Short Fiction, Ontario Review, Oxford American, O Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize volume and many other periodicals and anthologies. Much of the writer's early short fiction treated life in a rural Virginia village and the culture west of the Washington D.C. beltway. His novels and later short fiction set in Europe and America have taken historical settings from the American Revolutionary period in Rhode Island to a Tennessee coal miners' uprising of the 1890s, World War I France, a Depression Era orphanage, World War II home front, The American Mall Culture of the 1980s and lately, an America transformed by information technology. Gardiner lives east of the Shenandoah River and Blue Ridge Mountains in the village of Unison, Virginia with his wife, ceramic artist Joan Gardiner. His latest novel, Newport Rising, is available in print from Strafford and Unison or as an Amazon Kindle book. See the website johnrolfegardiner.com