The Bitterweed Path

Originally published in 1950, the long out-of-print novel The Bitterweed Path was rediscovered in 1996 with the support of John Howard’s critical introduction. In the years since, new generations have witnessed its subtle yet daring contribution to Southern gay literature. This 75th anniversary edition includes a new foreword by John Howard and a new afterword by Harry Thomas Jr. that provide fresh insight into the workings of race, class, and queerness in this enduring novel.

In The Bitterweed Path, Thomas Hal Phillips vividly recreates rural Mississippi at the turn of the twentieth century. In elegant prose, he draws on the Old Testament story of David and Jonathan and writes of the friendship and love between two boys—one a sharecropper’s son and the other the son of the landlord—and the complications that arise when the father of one of the boys falls in love with his son’s friend. Defying stereotypes about both Mississippi and the 1950s, The Bitterweed Path challenges conceptions of the US South as a place devoid of queerness and reimagines it as alive with same-sex desire.