Frank Capra (It's a Wonderful Life and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington) was one of the most influential American filmmakers in the 20th century. In the mid-'60s, Capra wrote a novel but never released it. Published 50 years later, Cry Wilderness is a funny, sometimes brutal take on small towns, nature and what it means to be free. The narrator is Capra himself, presenting this tale as a (somewhat) plausible shaggy dog story about the community of Mono County, Calif., where he has a vacation home. Somewhere in the wilderness are two vagrants, Dry Rot and Bear Bait, who live off the land and the charity of others. When the businessmen of Mono aim to run the two out of the county, a policeman refuses to do the deed, leading to a legal battle inside the municipality with Capra as a major actor and witness. Cry Wilderness moves along like a farce, until its end, where Capra pulls the rug out from under the reader, showing how deathly serious his intentions are. It's a surprisingly assured book from a man who wrote only one.
The novel has a wonderfully conversational style. Capra waxes poetic about the incredible natural landscape of Mono, and his dialogue is as snappy and earnest as the best of his films. But there's a dark tinge to everything as well. Capra sees how the delicate balance between humanity and nature is constantly wobbling, and that the freedom of people to thrive and of nature to endure is in fact one and the same. --Noah Cruickshank, adult engagement manager, the Field Museum, Chicago, Ill.