Everything to Live For

By Paul Horgan In the summer of 1921, a young man named Richard travels to Pennsylvania, there to provide company for his mysterious cousin, Max. Upon his arrival, Richard finds his initial misgivings unfounded: his cousin Max is everything he wishes himself to be—charming, original, handsome, heir to an immense fortune—and the two strike up a fast friendship. Yet Richard is not slow in discovering that all which is gold does not glitter: specters of suffering, falsehood, and grievance haunt Max, his parents, and their home, casting shadows over the brightest of moments and chills over the warmest of exchanges. For Max, refuge from this sad state is found in a secret world of his own making, set apart from everything (and everyone) else; for Richard, raised to live with what God has given him—love, innocence, equanimity—that secret world bristles with still more dangers. As the summer unfolds, Richard must contend with the truth that life is a series of barriers to meet and cross until the last and most mysterious of all: death. “Do we find true happiness only when we live for others without regard for self?” The sequel to Horgan’s 1964 Things As They Are, first published in 1968, Everything to Live For is a remarkable telling of the rite of passage from youth to manhood, capturing its passionate tensions and its high tragedy with discretion, empathy, and power.   Paul Horgan (1903–1995) was an American Catholic historian and novelist, praised by David McCullough as “a writer of large vision and many-sidedness” with a match­less “command of language and feeling for human nature.” Author of forty-plus books, including seventeen novels, Horgan received two Pulitzer Prizes, as well as nineteen honorary degrees and the University of Notre Dame’s Laetare Medal. * * * Paperback: 206pp. ISBN: 978-1685954826