It is the summer that man first walks on the moon, the Vietnam War is dragging into its sixth year, and riots are breaking out in American cities. At a black pride university two young men on opposite sides of the racial divide come to know an elderly and enigmatic teacher with the reputation of an Uncle Tom. Through the power of Professor Doswell’s character and the unfolding of his mysterious past, their lives are transformed.

Inspired in part by the true story of Whittaker Chambers, this novel is grounded in meticulous research based largely on discoveries from the previously undisclosed Venona Project as well as KGB files opened to Western scholars following the fall of the Soviet Union.

Franklin Debrot was born in Willemstadt, Curacao, Netherlands West Indies, in 1941. His family emigrated to the United States two years later, settling in New York City. Mr. Debrot grew up in Brooklyn where his father, a dentist, was active in the West Indian community.

In the early and mid 1960s he studied at Fairfield University in Connecticut and later at the University of Toronto, Canada. He first started teaching philosophy in 1966 at Shaw University, a traditional African-American institution in North Carolina. Since 1978 he has been teaching at James Madison University.

He was a contributing editor of The Southern Partisan from 1987 to 1992, and published stories and essays there, and in The Hillsdale Review, New Oxford Review, Perspective, and other journals over the years. One of his articles appeared in the anthology, Continuity in Crisis: The University at Bay.

Presently he is working on two other novels, The Love Experts and Grandpa’s Gift, as well as a philosophy text, Love of Wisdom: The Self-Examined Life. To keep up to date with Mr. Debrot’s most recent publications visit www.DebrotNovels.com.

He has two grown children and lives with his wife in Virginia.