End as a Man

"No youth can pass through four years of The Academy and not end as a man!" Out of the vivid and blazing pages of END AS A MAN comes a compelling story about a group of young men in a military academy who are thrown together unhappily under circumstances that are bound to bring out the human defections in all their naked Jocko de Paris had the subtle musculature of a swimmer,and a cold wall of sensitive reserve that waited to be broken down. Larrence Corger,neat,erect; he overpowered the girls with his dark bronze color,his blue eyes and yellow hair. Roger "Black" Gatt,a muscular youth with not much intelligence who used his wealth as a gouge to get what he could out of anyone. Perrin McKee,brillant and strangely disarranged. Robert Marquales,weak-kneed and callow who finds the hypertensions of The Academy grinding brutally away at the framework of his individuality. The novel boast's three movie versions,yet it still remains a rather obscure yet critically renown work from an equally renown yet sadly underrated author.Amongst the backdrop of an age old tradition peculiar to the south,the military school,and an even older one the symbolic bizarre ''right of passage'' to end as a man.Hence the title.More than physical transformation is at stake; the spirit and above all honor must be transformed as well.It painfully and unflatteringly reveals the true face of a nihilistic evil in icecold detail in the visages of the upperclass-cadet's.Unforgettable charachter's like Jocko Deparis and his machiavellian like dark eminence over other'underclassmen'.This novel was written shortly after WWII.A war most notable for the most charasmatic, ultimately self-destructive despot personality the world has ever Hitler.Willingham himself explained his own struggle to come to grips in this novel,with not only what has affected our past but indeed our forseeable future.End as a Man is at it's essence about the struggle to power and the cult of personality.