Home

Home Synopsis

A history professor experiences disturbing parallels between the furor over hiring decisions and an alleged case of sexual harassment on his own campus, and the harassment of an anarchist commune on south Puget Sound in 1902.

Fact meets fiction in Hazard Adams's latest novel. Using an actual turn-of-the-century anarchist commune on Washington's south Puget Sound as the backdrop, Adams tells the story of Edward Williams, a present-day history professor and former vice president at nearby State University. As he studies and imagines the lives of those who participated in the commune, which came under vicious attack after the assassination of President McKinley in 1901, Williams is drawn into disputes on his campus over the proposed appointment of a distinguished feminist professor of American studies and an alleged case of sexual harassment. Both comic and tragic events ensue.

Employing photographs taken at Home in 1902 and 2000 and parts of diaries kept by visitors to the commune, Adams dramatizes the parallels and contrasts between the events of 1902 and those of 1990-91 as they are experienced by a variety of characters in both periods.

With Home, Adams completes his fictive account of academic life in the latter half of the twentieth century, begun with The Horses of Instruction, set in the fifties, and continued with Many Pretty Toys, set in 1970-71.