Funeral Home

Franklin G. Hempel’s novel, Funeral Home, tells the unforgettable story of protagonist Marcus Reel’s childhood and coming of age in south-central Texas during the 1940s and ’50s. In both his tale and his way of telling it, author Hempel joins a great and uniquely American literary tradition—stretching from Melville to Twain to Faulkner and Steinbeck—depicting the spiritual metamorphosis from boy to man. Funeral Home is an unflinchingly realistic, vividly realized psychobiography that will periodically leave its readers gasping for emotional breath. After an impoverished childhood scarred by deep personal tragedy, Marcus Reel’s life changes radically when he lands a job in a small Texas town’s funeral home. In his friendship with a fellow employee, an older black man named Willie, Marcus finds both a world-wise counselor and the most worthy father figure of his young life. The mortuary’s owners and staff, in fact, become his surrogate family, and Marcus lives in the first real home he has ever known, even if it is a funeral home. In a place devoted to the tasks and ceremonies surrounding the ends of lives, Marcus finds the true beginning of his own. Marcus’ coming-of-age experiences in the mortuary business—and elsewhere—inexorably reshape his attitudes and values from those of his sharecropping father. As he teeters on the verge of manhood, Marcus must come to terms with his disturbing memories of the physical and emotional privations of his childhood, struggle to understand the racial prejudices and economic injustices of ’40s and ’50s America, discover what it means to be a good and decent human being, and, ultimately, make his own way in the world. Funeral Home is high-impact fiction that, once read, will not soon be forgotten.

About the Author

After spending his formative years in central and southeast Texas, author Franklin G. Hempel went on to earn a doctorate in physiology and to lead a professional career as a medical-school faculty member and a director/administrator of scientific research for the United States government. Now retired, he resides in Durham, North Carolina.

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