An Hour Before Daylight

An Hour Before Daylight
by Jimmy Carter

An Hour Before Daylight
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Book Summary Information

Author: Jimmy Carter
Edition: Hardcover
Published: 2001-01-11
ISBN: 0743211936
Number of pages: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Book Reviews of An Hour Before Daylight

Book Review: Easy to read
Summary: 5 Stars

This is a very enjoyable book. I love to read about the true
South. Jimmy Carter is a man to be admired. He grew up learning
to work for what he wanted. He shows great respect for others.
A very good read.

Summary of An Hour Before Daylight

Born on October 1, 1924, Jimmy Carter grew up on a Georgia farm during the Great Depression. In An Hour Before Daylight, the former president tells the story of his rural boyhood, and paints a sensitive portrait of America before the civil rights movement.

Carter describes--in glorious, if sometimes gory, detail--growing up on a farm where everything was done by either hand or mule: plowing fields, "mopping" cotton to kill pests, cutting sugar cane, shaking peanuts, or processing pork. He also describes the joys of walking barefoot ("this habit alone helped to create a sense of intimacy with the earth"), taking naps with his father on the porch after lunch, and hunting with slingshots and boomerangs with his playmates--all of whom were black. Carter was in constant contact with his black neighbors; he worked alongside them, ate in their homes, and often spent the night in the home of Rachel and Jack Clark, "on a pallet on the floor stuffed with corn shucks," when his parents were away. However, this intimacy was possible only on the farm. When young Jimmy and his best friend, A.D. Davis, went to town to see a movie, they waited for the train together, paid their 15 cents, and then separated into "white" and "colored" compartments. Once in Americus, they walked to the theater together, but separated again, with Jimmy buying a seat on the main floor or first balcony at the front door, and A.D. going around to the back door to buy his seat up in the upper balcony. After the movie, they returned home on another segregated train. "I don't remember ever questioning the mandatory racial separation, which we accepted like breathing or waking up in Archery every morning."

In this warm, almost sepia-toned narrative, Carter describes his relationships with his parents and with the five people--only two of whom were white--who most affected his early life. Best of all, however, Carter presents his sweetly nostalgic recollections of a lost America. --Sunny Delaney


In an American story of enduring importance, Jimmy Carter re-creates his Depression-era boyhood on a Georgia farm, before the civil rights movement that changed it and the country.

In what is sure to become a classic, the bestselling author of Living Faith and Sources of Strength writes about the powerful rhythms of countryside and community in a sharecropping economy. Along the way, he offers an unforgettable portrait of his father, a brilliant farmer and strict segregationist who treated black workers with his own brand of "separate" respect and fairness, and his strong-willed and well-read mother, a nurse who cared for all in need -- regardless of their position in the community.

Carter describes the five other people who shaped his early life, only two of them white: his eccentric relatives who sometimes caused the boy to examine his heritage with dismay; the boyhood friends with whom he hunted with slingshots and boomerangs and worked the farm, but who could not attend the same school; and the eminent black bishop who refused to come to the Carters' back door but who would stand near his Cadillac in the front yard discussing crops and politics with Jimmy's father.

Carter's clean and eloquent prose evokes a time when the cycles of life were predictable and simple and the rules were heartbreaking and complex. In his singular voice and with a novelist's gift for detail, Jimmy Carter creates a sensitive portrait of an era that shaped the nation.

An Hour Before Daylight is destined to stand with other timeless works of American literature.


Filled with the loving memories of his parents, childhood friends, and neighbors, An Hour Before Daylight is Jimmy Carter's beautiful and touching recollection of his Depression-era youth outside of the small town of Plains, Georgia -- a sweeping look at the South as it existed before the Civil Rights Movement changed the country forever. Blessed with a novelist's gift for detail, Carter describes the pressure of farming in very hard times, and most importantly, how a society of god-fearing men and women, who acted with individual kindness, could have been blind to the sin of discrimination until they were awakened by their fellow man. An Hour Before Daylight is ultimately a biography of the American South, written with stunning honesty by one of its most talented sons.

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