At Heaven’s Gate

At Heaven’s Gate is a novel of violence, of human beings struggling against a fate beyond their power to alter, of corruption, and of honor. It is the story of Sue Murdock, the daughter of an unscrupulous speculator who has created a financial empire in the South, and the three men with whom she tries to escape the dominance of her father and her father’s world. The background is the capital of a Southern state in the late twenties and the promoters and politicians, the aristocrats and poor whites, the labor organizers and the dispossessed farmers, the backwoods prophets and the university intellectuals who are drawn into its orbit. Warren’s picture of the South is as fresh, dramatic, and powerful today as it was when the book was first published. Its plot structure is a tour de force.

From the jacket of the New Directions (1985) edition.