The Foundations of Kindness, Paperback

Young revolutionaries take on the Chicago Democratic Party machine with disastrous consequences for them and their movement. Fifty years later some of them are older, wiser, weaker, but uncowed.

Richard Vission became a novelist as a teenager in a seminar with Saul Bellow, but when he quit school to write the great American novel, he discovered he lacked imagination. It took him many years of living to compensate for this lack, but eventually he acquired enough experience to write six novels. The Foundations of Kindness is the first--and last--of them. Most of it was written in 1975-6. The logues (prologue, dialogues, epilogues) were added between 2014 and 2018. After leaving Chicago he lived thirty-five years in the West Kootenays of British Columbia and six years in China. He presently lives in the Victoria area of Vancouver Island.