Dogface tells his father, Preacher Epperson, who gets Martha involved, and she comes down on Leo pretty hard.

Part Two: The Green Dragon In anticipation of college Robert goes to visit Boone University that his grandfather was a professor at and his mother was a student.

Anna and the baby are killed in a car accident at which time Leo decides to make the world feel sorry for what they have been through.

Conroy himself lived as a manual laborer by day and a writer by night and his life can be seen played out as the major thematical element of the novel in the characters of half-brothers Leo and Robert Hurley.

The majority of his adult life centered on keeping employment and all possible costs, regardless of low-wages or poor working conditions in order to support his wife and children.

Robert as the writer spent his adult life working on poetry and attempting to write a novel while being supported by another individual.

Being kept away from manual labor and taught to become a writer at a young age by his mother, Robert would find himself later in life a man without work being supported by a woman whom he never married, nor fathered any children with.

“In her review of A World to Win for New Masses, Meridel Le Sueur suggested that Conroy had fallen victim to the, “seductiveness of bourgeois literature and its forms.” [4]