Word: 1850s
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Orville Lothrop Freeman, 42. Orville Freeman's Swedish grandfather homesteaded a farm in Minnesota in the 1850s, but Orville was a city boy, son of a Minneapolis storekeeper. He graduated magna cum laude from the University of Minnesota just in time to enlist in the Marines at the start of World War II. During the Bougainville campaign, a Japanese bullet ripped through his left cheek, left him unable to speak. As the wound healed-the scar is still visible-Freeman learned to talk again and in the process developed into an uncommonly forceful orator...
...events are dramatic enough-the murder itself, a near lynching, and several seductions (not nearly as many, though, as in recent O'Hara novels). But the real drama, revealed piecemeal and with a strange detachment, takes place in Millhouser's own soul. He was born in the 1850s, idolized his father, and never really recovered from the father's death shortly after the Civil War. His mother, a strong but withdrawn woman, could not make up the loss. When Millhouser leaves for college he is starved for love, and he finds a substitute in an absorbing friendship...