An Unfinished Season, Just - B+

         This is a superb novel set in Chicago and the North Shore in the summer of 1954. Nineteen-year-old Wils Ravan is bored, headed to the University of Chicago in the fall, going to a lot of debutante balls, and working for the summer at an afternoon tabloid about to fold. He learns the ways of the world at the paper, and falls madly for Aurora Brule at night. The fun part of this book is the description of life in Lake Forest, a Lake Forest I've never known, one filled with debs thinking about the East Coast girls schools', dads who are doctors and lawyers, young men back from prep schools and everyone going to the local country club. At one of the parties that summer, one of the moms tells Wils they don't have his paper in the house because they "wouldn't want the maid to see it." He goes on to describe the Winnetka to Lake Forest world as a separate rift valley in the midwest.  Equally fascinating are the descriptions of the city at that time and the line, "Chicago itself had a nineteenth-century identity: a noisy unlovely city of iron and concrete, a city on the grab, fundamentally lawless, its days spent chasing money and its nights spending it.."

        The author was a third-generation newspaperman who attended a private prep school in Lake Forest, and later was one of Ben Bradlee's first hires at the Post. The book was a Pulitzer finalist two decades ago.