In this powerful memoir, former President and bestselling author Jimmy Carter writes about the powerful rhythms of countryside and community in a sharecropping economy. He offers an unforgettable portrait of his father, a brilliant farmer and strict segregationist who treated black workers with his own brand of 'separate' respect and fairness; and his strong-willed and well-read mother, a nurse who cared for all in need. He describes the five other people who shaped his early life, only two of them white; his eccentric relatives; and the boyhood friends with whom he worked the farm and hunted with slingshots and boomerangs, but who could not attend the same school. Carter's clean and eloquent prose evokes a time when the cycles of life were predictable and simple and the rules were heart-breaking and complex. AN HOUR BEFORE DAYLIGHT is destined to stand with other timeless works of American literature.