Children of Strangers is the powerful and moving novel of love in a community bound by race and class. Famie is a mulatto girl whose ancestors-free blacks-rivaled the white planters in wealth and culture. But on a Louisiana plantation in the 1920s, she is an outcast, rejected by whites because of her black ancestors and unwilling to associate with the sharecroppers who are descendants of slaves. An illicit love affair with a white landowner leaves her with a son, Joel. Her dream is that Joel will someday become accepted into white society. But in her struggle to transcend race and class, Famie must sacrifice the last links to her past.

Lyle Saxon (1891-1946) ranks among Louisiana's most outstanding writers. During the 1920s and 1930s he was the central figure in the regionís literary community, and was widely known as a raconteur and bon vivant. In addition to Father Mississippi, Lafitte the Pirate, and Children of Strangers, he also wrote Fabulous New Orleans, Old Louisiana, The Friends of Joe Gilmore, and was a co-author of Gumbo Ya-Ya, with Edward Dreyer and Robert Tallant. During the Depression, he directed the state WPA Writers Project, which produced the WPA Guide to Louisiana and the WPA Guide to New Orleans.