My Friend Casey

About the Book

After moving from town to town, Philip Nason and his family finally settle in a working-class neighborhood in Detroit. It’s the summer of 1937, shortly after Philip turns eleven. A lonely child, he inhabits a world of daydreams, filling notebooks with his cartoon fantasies. He discovers he’s unable to compete in the rough-and-tumble games that are a boy’s rite of passage.

Then Philip meets Jeremiah Casey—bigger, older, stronger, better at games than everyone else, but somehow isolated by his exceptional abilities. In Philip, Casey finds a fellow dreamer and artist. Together, they try to make an animated movie, send cartoons to syndicates, and finally produce a neighborhood newspaper. As they attempt to join the ranks of Al Capp and other famous cartoonists, their aspirations conflict with the upheavals of sexual awakening, the pressures of working-class life, and the coming of World War II. The dreams of Philip survive, but those of his older friend and hero do not.

My Friend Casey evokes a lost time and place and traces, along a darkening landscape, the path of what may have been the last surge of American optimism.

About the Author

Michael Cantwell, a graduate of Brown University, has conducted writing and drama workshops for chronically ill children and adults in a New York City hospital. He has traveled extensively in Mexico and Guatemala, studying histories and diverse cultures. Cantwell lives in New York. This is his seventh book.