Glenn Taylor was born and raised in Huntington, West Virginia. The Marrowbone Marble Company is his second novel. His first novel, The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart was released to critical acclaim and was a 2008 Barnes & Noble Discover pick, and a finalist for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award. Taylor teaches English at Harper College, in suburban Chicago, where he lives with his wife and three sons.
Taylor returns to the West Virginia backdrop of his NBCC-award finalist The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart with a novel that spans almost three decades in the life of an orphan. Between attending college classes and working as a factory furnace tender at Mann Glass Company, 18-year-old Loyal Ledford keeps himself busy. But when WWII begins, he dutifully enlists in the Marine Corps, abandons his girlfriend (and boss's daughter), Rachel, and heads off to war, where he quells the trauma with whiskey. Ledford's homecoming is celebrated with a marriage to Rachel, a return to school and the glass factory, and the birth of two children. The ghosts of his wartime stint plague his psyche, but after meeting his part-Indian cousins, the Bonecutter brothers, and becoming enchanted with the family land where they live, Loyal and his cousins begin a marble manufacturing company. Soon, civil rights strife rips through the region, threatening the survival of Loyal's company and the future of his family. Taylor's socially astute and fast-moving sophomore novel is earthy, authentic, and a testament to his literary talent. (May) Copyright 2010 Reed Business Information.
"Taylor really is in that long American tradition that starts with Mark Twain and finds its character, meaning and moral force in the extraordinariness of ordinary people." TIME OUT "a mesmerizing storyteller!Taylor has created a remarkably complex, soulful, and provocative historical novel righteous in its perspective on America's struggle to live up to its core beliefs." BOOKLIST "He writes with the elemental force of a latterday John Steinbeck." CANBERRA TIMES "This novel confirms the view that he is a major and original talent." SYDNEY MORNING HERALD "Splendidly Norman Rockwell-ish!It's like watching an idealistic old movie made in pre-McCarthy Hollywood." THE TIMES "Marrowbone throbs with muscular Hemingway sentences, consciously biblical cadences, a plethora of imagery where almost every mundane event holds a major and marvellous message." WEEKEND HERALD
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