Summary

Little Sister: Tragedy of Premature Love. Written as a feature film script in the 1950's, but not published due to realistic quality of the story involving teenage sex and violence, Wayne Andersen fuses script-writing with the qualities of a novel, allowing the reader to identify with one or the other of the principal characters as if playing the part, whether Helen Parker at age fourteen, or Erik Bloodaxe at age seventeen. Tested on a half-dozen readers, each found reading the novel an exciting new experience -reading as if watching a movie.

Pretending to be brother and sister during the day, yet lovers at night, this story has all the tenderness to bring one to tears, yet violence that reminds us of how treacherous life can be for parentless children forced into adulthood before childhood has prepared them. The story opens in the San Francisco Bay area in 1943, and ends in the Craters of the Moon National Park in Idaho.

Author Bio

Wayne Andersen is professor emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During the 1950s while attending the University of California at Berkeley, he was an abstract expressionist painter and architectural designer in the San Francisco Bay area. He moved to New York in 1959 to undertake graduate studies in art history and archeology at Columbia. After completing his doctorate and spending a year as senior curator of the Walker Art Center, he spent two years in Paris before joining the Department of Architecture at MIT in 1965. Through the 1970s and 1980s, the firm he founded, Vesti Design International, carried out major architectural projects in Saudi Arabia. He is the author of nine books and many essays. He currently resides in Boston with his wife, the landscape historian Phyllis Andersen.