The River Road: Frances Parkinson Keyes

The story of two generations of a Creole family, the d'Alverys of Belle Heloise, set just after the end of World War I. A returned war hero, a son of one of the great houses, marries a girl from the wrong side of town - the girl who had waited for him in single-hearted devotion. He takes her home and she makes for herself a place in his life, even winning over his proud patrician mother and sister. In the next generation a child is raised to believe he is one of a pair of twins when in truth, he is the result of the sister's unhappy love affair. The background is that of well-to-do planters in the sugar belt; intimate details of the plantation life, the luxuriously run households, the intricate machinery of running the plantation; and great passions, secrets, wildcat hunts and beer and shrimp parties abound.