A Young Man's Search For Himself: An Autobiographical Novel Of The Great Depression

A Young Man's Search For Himself is Jake Culpepper's gripping telling of the fight for survival of the Rutledge Family during the Dust Bowl Days of the Great Depression. Set in the rural Texas Panhandle, the story features: 1) the hard-working Ben Rutledge, third-grade education, middle-aged tenant farmer, head of the household (in name only: severely henpecked), who has never known anything but poverty; 2) his wife Callie, tenth-grade education, who met and fell in love with Ben when he was her wealthy father's hired hand - and who before meeting Ben had aspired to get a college education and be a school teacher but her dad, firmly believing that a woman's place was in the home, or working in the fields, intervened; 3) Ben and Callie's six children; 4) the beloved Uncle Woody, a hobo who rides the rails.
Donald Rutledge, the young man of the title, the third-born of Ben and Callie, knows he isn't wanted because the puritanical Callie never tires of telling the world that she "never wanted but one young'un but that nasty Ben always had his way, never paid any attention to my wants." Having Callie pound into him day and night that he must get a college education ("get an education and be somebody, not a failure like your daddy"), Donny struggles mightily to please his mother and supplant first-born brother Leroy as her wanted child. Unlike Leroy, whose mind turns early to girls, Donny, who loves books, is always at the top of his class but, since he can find no male role model and doesn't know who to be like, lives with the constant fear that he will grow up to be a nobody like his daddy. Thus A Young Man's Search For Himself, played out against a backdrop of the incessant, suffocating duststorms, will be seen not only as the entire Rutledge Family's heroic struggle against grinding poverty... but also, a story within a story, as Donny's determined effort to identify, come to grips with and overcome his many demons (including a paralyzing fear of girls), planted in large part by his well-meaning but neurotic and deeply frustrated, but never defeated, mother - to figure out who he is and was meant to be, to get a college education and set about becoming somebody. It's a compelling story told by an oldtimer who was there. A Young Man's Search For Himself is Culpepper's eleventh novel.