Red Sky at Morning is a 1968 novel by Richard Bradford. It was made into a 1971 film of the same name. The book follows Josh Arnold, a young man whose family relocates from Mobile, Alabama to Corazon Sagrado, New Mexico during World War II. It was regarded as a "true delight" (Washington Post Book World) and a "novel of consequence" (New York Times Book Review). Today, it is still regarded as a classic coming-of-age story. The title of the novel comes from a line in an ancient mariner's rhyme "Red sky at morning, sailor take warning".

Characters/plot details

Setting

The novel is set in a fictional county called "Cabezon County". The opening of Chapter 13 reads, "A ratty blue bus makes a daily circle of the little mountain towns in Cabezon County, from Sagrado to the valley at Yunque, and then up through the hills -- San Esteban, San Maria, Villa Galicia, Ojo Amargo, Rio Venado, Rio Conejo, Amorcita and, at the end of the route, nearly 11,000 feet high, La Cima." These town place names are also fictional.

Critical reception

Red Sky at Morning was reviewed by the New York Times in 1968. They wrote that it "succeeds very well in being what its author intended it to be: very entertaining, very readable, very funny. Unnoticed, beneath its always-diverting surface, are the deeper feelings of the people involved until suddenly, very briefly, they break through, and we find that they are real people, serious people, after all, and that what we are reading is not just very skillful entertainment but a novel of consequence". Harper Lee said “Red Sky at Morning is a minor marvel: it is a novel of paradox, of identity, of an overwhelming YES to life that embraces with wonder what we are pleased to call the human condition. In short, a work of art.”