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Author of Riding the Rails: Teenagers on the Move During the Great Depression and best-selling historical novel, Brazil.
Uys collaborated with James A. Michener on his South African novel, The Covenant. In writing Brazil, Uys traveled 15,000 miles in Brazil and took five years to complete his epic task, which was acclaimed worldwide.
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Background
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I wrote my first book at ten. It was forty pages penned on the back of worthless stock certificates tossed out by my parents. At sixteen, I finished a full-length novel. I still have a slew of rejection slips for this effort.
That manuscript landed me my first newspaper job when I included it with my application to work as a cub reporter on the Johannesburg Star. I spent the next 15 years as a reporter, feature writer and editor on newspapers and magazines in South Africa, England and the United States.
In 1977, I left my birthplace and immigrated to the United States. I had started work on a South African novel before coming here. When James A. Michener and I met, it was clear that we were thinking along similar lines. I spent two years with Michener, including four months during which I lived at his Maryland home. We put our heads together on every aspect of The Covenant, from the plotting to the final manuscript. -- What I gained above all was the faith that I could go out and write a vast historical novel like Michener.
Riding the Rails was inspired by 3,000 letters received from the boxcar boys and girls of the 1930s. Their stories reveal nothing less than the spirit of America — youthful optimism, the will to make the best of things, the love of freedom.The Great Depression was a heinous time that left deep scars. Letter writers express life-long fears of going broke again. When they left the rails and got a hold on their lives, they never let go. Many tell of keeping the jobs they found for 30 or 40 years. And the girls they met, too: many write joyously of their enduring devotion to the sweethearts they married when they settled down. None speak of the pluck and courage they showed in going to seek a better life. —To me, they are all heroes of America.
Whether I am writing fiction or non-fiction, I strive to understand, to feel and touch the lives of people I write about. It is a rare privilege that writers have. It is also a deep responsibility.
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Birth Place
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Johannesburg, AR South Africa
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Accomplishments
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Riding the Rails: Teenagers on the Move During the Great Depression was chosen as one of the "10 Best Books of the Year," by Amazon's history editors.
Riding the Rails, the companion documentary made by Michael Uys and Lexy Lovell has won 18 major awards, including the Peabody Award and Best Documentary from the Director's Guild of America and the Los Angeles Film Critics
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Additional Information
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Contact Information
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Favorite Links
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Brazil, a Novel
A spellbinding saga on a truly epic scale that brings to life Brazil and her history. Through the lives of two powerful families, Brazil depicts five turbulent centuries in the history of a remarkable land. Author's website with the story of how the novel Brazil was written over a period of five years.
"A masterpiece! Brazil has the feel of an enchanted virgin forest, a totally new and original world for the read-er-explorer to discover." - L'Express, Paris
Riding the Rails
By the height of the Great Depression, 250,000 teenagers were hopping freight trains with the hope that a better life awaited them. Based on 3,000 letters from former boxcar boys and girls -- Read ten of the original letters on the website. -- Riding the Rails recaptures one of the neglected sagas of America, a rite of passage for an enture generation.
"The reader can all but hear the cadence of the trains on the tracks and lonesome wail at every whistle-stop." --The Boston Globe
The Last Generation of Chainsmokers
I'm orchestrating the launch of Stephen Creagh Uys's debut novel, The Last Generation of Chainsmokers under the iUniverse label. As an editor and writer with thirty years' experience, I've no illusions about the challenges involved. The first and most critical step is a book that will leave a reader breathless:
The Last Generation of Chainsmokers is a dark and dazzling novel about doomed love in New York's Lower East Side in the 1990s.
When Crane King and Kimberly Anderson first meet in The Village Idiot, it is the middle of the day and both are drunk. The story of their besotted passion in a downward-spiraling world is at once tender — the exquisite pain of mad love — and menacing in its descent toward impending catastrophe.
Stephen Creagh Uys draws on shifting, often fragmentary points of view to tell the aching love story of a couple perfectly suited to each other, but not the world. They are Scott and Zelda caught in the crosshairs of Big Daddy-O Apple, a haywire existence with devastating consequences for all around them.
Uys takes no prisoners in this taut, harrowing book that moves seamlessly from Madison Avenue to the holding pens of The Tombs. Lives lived minimally loom large on every page, with brilliant, often savage wordplay, from a streetwise and savvy observer of the city that never sleeps.
The Last Generation of Chainsmokers
A dark and dazzling novel of love in New York in the 1990s
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