When George Canaris, a writing professor on the verge of forced retirement at a small college in Ohio, is killed by a hit-and-run driver, he is the first faculty member in half a century whose death merits an obituary in The New York Times. "A writer, a critic, a professor, a campus legend and a national figure, the very embodiment of the liberal arts," says the paper. And a mystery. "Compared to Faulkner and Dos Passos at the start of his career," the Times observed, "in the end he resembled Harper Lee." With a book listed among the one hundred greatest novels of all time, decades now separating him from the hefty advance taken on his next book, The Beast, and not a page to show of it, Canaris is an enigma. Inevitably, speculation grows that the book was a myth, a lie, a joke.
Upon his death, Mark May, a young English professor who barely knew him finds himself named as Canaris's literary executor and begins a search through lives and letters that is at once gripping, hilarious, and affirming. A true page- turner, Gone Tomorrow is equal parts Richard Russo and Michael Chabon, and yet entirely unlike anything you've ever read.
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