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Live Free Or Die, Ernest Hebert

Dartmouth Scholarship

"You stay in your hometown, you end up more of a stranger than if you'd started new someplace else." The struggle between the indigenous rural working class and the upper crust intensifies in this final novel of Hebert's Darby series as Freddy Elman, son of the town trash collector, and Lilith Salmon, daughter of a prestigious family, embark on their ill-fated love affair. Seeing Darby through new eyes, Freddy comes to realize that "the kind of people who hunkered down among these tree-infested, rock-strewn hills" is "dying out, replaced by people with money, education, culture, people 'wise in the ways …