Ezra Burke, like his tenant-farmer father before him, struggles to eke out a living
from a rented plot of depleted, rocky soil in his beloved Blue Ridge Mountains.
With crops destroyed by a freakish summer storm and hopelessly in debt, he is
forced into the employ of the wicked and cunning landowner. When further tragedy
strikes, Ezra, still a young, but now a desperate man, hears of work down in
Corinth-the cotton mills are hiring.
With his wife Judith-half Cherokee and who alone bears the burden of a dark and
terrible secret-and two small children, Ezra leaves the mountains for a new life
in Corinth where he has found work at the mammoth Galway Mill. An honest and
independent man, he is ill-prepared for the intrigues, politics, and greed of mill life
in the industrial city.
As the dream of someday returning to the mountains slowly, but inevitability fades,
the hardships and injustices imposed on the workers by the wealthy mill owners
become untenable. When union organizers from the North arrive in Corinth, the
situation intensifies and finally reaches a boiling point. Threatened, manipulated,
and ostracized, Ezra is faced with a choice-one that could cost him everything.
Set against the backdrop of a recovering South still showing scars of Reconstruction,
now stifled by the Great Depression, simmering but unspoken racial tensions, and
unscrupulous mill owners, None but the Living explores the struggles and pathos of
displaced people trying to maintain their identity and values in a world new and
strange to them-a world of subterfuge, of haves and have-nots, of conformity, of
injustice. Such is the saga of the Burke family.
