The Winter After This Summer - Stanley Ellin

In the wake of a tragic accident, a young college student haunted by guilt moves to New York City to shake the past and discover his destiny.

After three years at Temple University, Dan Egan was still trying to find out who he was. Frustratingly unmoored, he moved from engineering to fine arts and finally to humanities, plowed under each time. He was the one in the back row, sleeping behind dark glasses—the "ivy beleaguered" dilettante soon to be adrift in the very real world of working men.

Now, following his expulsion after a tragic dorm fire, Dan has finally been defined. He's the guy who failed to save his roommate—all-American football hero, Time magazine's golden cover boy, and Dan's best friend since childhood. Maybe Dan will take the midnight train to Philadelphia and weather the worst of the family storm. Maybe not. Wherever Dan's headed, he'll be carrying his buddy's ghost.

Then he meets the Barbara Jean Avery, the dumb, sweet still-virginal child bride of a dangerous old crust named Michael. She reads movie magazines, flounces around Coney Island, and has Technicolor dreams that will never come true. Dan's got a thing for her; maybe she can make his dreams come true. Without even trying, without even realizing, Barbara Jean and Michael are going to change Dan's life.

A novel that flirts with the mysteries of being human—from the comic to the sexual to the tragic— The Winter After This Summer is a singular work in the canon of a three-time Edgar Award–winning author, a late coming-of-age story written with a fierce and respectful regard for man's fate.