Run with the Horsemen (Contemporary American)

Porter Osborne, Jr. is a precocious, sensitive, and rambunctious boy trying to make it through adolescence during the Depression years. On a red-clay farm in rural Georgia he learns all there is to know about cotton chopping, hog killing, watermelon thumping, and mule handling. School provides a quick course in practical joking, schoolboy crushes, athletic glory, and clandestine sex. But it is Porter's family - his genteel, patient mother, his swarm of cousins, his snuff-dipping grandmother, and most of all, his beloved though flawed father - who teach Porter the painful truths about growing strong enough to run with the horsemen.