Welcome To Thebes is Glendon Swarthout's naughty book. Based upon an actual case of multiple underaged rape which took place in the 1950's in a small Michigan town, Lowell, Michigan, which the author grew up in. Readers who remember Grace Metalious's 1956 bestseller, Peyton Place, which became a hit film, then a sequel novel and a TV miniseries,will see the literary similarities. But this is an example of a fine author taking a true event and fictionalizing it mightily, tying up rough story ends to make a more dramatic tale.
The scarifying events of Sewell Smith's youth had left him shattered and embittered. On his return to his home town of Thebes, Michigan, morally and financially bankrupt from a writing career in films, these early experiences began to take on a different hue, no less corrosive but illuminating the moral climate of the place. In the background are the sly seduction of a lonely high school girl, the mental derangement and commitment of Sewell's mother, his father's strange death, the boy's malicious acts of vandalism, his flight and Army enlistment, his brilliant war record, his successful novel, his meteoric Hollywood career and his return to Thebes. Fate hands Sewell the means of crucifying the local leaders who he hates, when the dissolute mother of a fourteen-year-old girl reveals to him that one of these town pillars has corrupted her little daughter. As it turns out, six of the town's elders are also involved.
As Sewell's ruthless plan evolves, we learn in flashbacks and belated revelations the innermost secrets of this community, which are universal in their human meanings. We can see Everytown in Thebes, and some readers may say, "there but for the grace of God...."
Glendon based his 3rd "big book" on a real event which scandalized his boyhood town, and this racy novel was perhaps his most personal, for it vividly describes some of the citizens in a small area of the upper Midwest he was intimately familiar with as a boy. Consequently this tragic Grecian drama caused this adult author stress during its creation and he found Thebes one of his most difficult novels to write, after the added pressure of his first two big bestsellers and the movies made from them (They Came To Cordura and Where The Boys Are) being so successful.
