The Fruit of Exile

The Fruit of Exile is a coming of age novel, written when the author was twenty-one to twenty-three, and is about an adolescent, Isaac Cider, who is no older than twenty years old after the book ends. Alienated from his wealthy family, he has removed himself from the society they symbolize, and has run away from his life of privilege, to live in a constructed tree-house somewhere in Kansas. He has chosen to live largely in the wilderness, to see what it has to teach, and along the way encounters an imaginative cast of outcasts, outlaws, thieves, squatters, eccentrics, and hermits. But these human distractions often times call him away from his true calling in life, and he shares with these characters, and experiences by himself, joy, despair, inhuman poverty, alienation, suffering, starvation, and manages to rise above the depravity and squalor with dignity, honor, and humor.