The Forward of DEVIL MAKE A THIRD

As the town is the nation in seed, (The southeast Alabama town of Aven becomes a character itself as this novel unfolds an almost 30 turn-of-the-century year story  (1887-1916) which saw a fallow wilderness introduced to the American Industrial Revolution. Growing from a population of less than 200 to almost 10,000 in a few years, it is a tale about how a solitary frontier Wiregrass "dirt road sport" with a fourth grade education and an unquenchable thirst for domination goes from a side job as a teenage pawnbroker to become a corporate psychopath who expanded his power to the point where he was able to control the entire population of Aven through finance, politics and property ownership.)

so is a strong man the kernel of the town. 

(The novel never leaves the point of view of the character of Buck Bannon, a man whose values were forged through the childhood trauma produced by a life dominated by preparing, planting, nurturing and harvesting a field of cotton every year for the first eighteen of his life. With his actions and inner monologues over the course of 34 chapters and 11 interludes, we experience Buck's unsentimental vision of urbanization manifest itself.)

The life of the strong man is the beam from which the vigor of the town is projected, and, since the progress of man is by nature episodic, so a town may leap one year and stumble another. Robust in peak times, bloodless in the valleys, the commonwealth ebbs and flows with the temper of its men.

The lusty, always greedy, sometimes fumbling fingers of the strong man enrich the country in spite of his motives, as the earthworm's blind and selfish groping mellows the soil. (Just as the earthworm was born to instinctively consume waste and turn it into the black gold of fertile soil, so Buck Bannon's innate lust for power enriches those who share the streets of Aven with him.)

Those other men, those who grovel and hesitate, live only within the boundary of their fears, in a dusty husk of a world, until the strong man comes, saying,

"I will build for myself, and if the public harvest follows my private vice, then join me at the board and leave it gratified." (In the novel's last chapter,Buck described his deep insatiable hunger to his wife, "The town's growing and I'll build more stores and buy more land, and make more money, as long as anybody makes it. I'll get mine all right, even if there are more face cards in the deck nowadays." (clippings from the September 9, 1911 DOTHAN EAGLE and from the August 16, 1914 MONTGOMERY ADVERTISER)