An accomplished businessman faces the biggest challenge of his life when his race to the top is halted by a heart attack in this New York Times bestseller from the author of Executive Suite
After a business trip to New York, advertising executive Judd Wilder returns to Pennsylvania, where he plans to drop off the annual stockholders’ report with his boss at Crouch Carpet Company. There’s no warning, no premonition of disaster, just a slight case of indigestion, which escalates into debilitating pain. Taken by ambulance to the local hospital, Judd at first refuses to believe that he has suffered a heart attack.
Dr. Aaron Kharr specializes in cardiac behavior patterns. In Judd, he sees a businessman in his peak stress years whose long-building tensions have erupted in an emotional hurricane. Kharr’s goal is to heal both Judd’s mind and his body. As the doc studies the events in his patient’s past that have led to this point, Judd’s company undergoes a change of ownership and reorganization that mirrors his own recovery.
With its multi-layered plot and teeming canvas of characters, including Judd’s wife, Kay; their son, Rolfe; and the fascinating Matthew Crouch, The Hurricane Years is a captivating novel about the rewards and pitfalls of corporate life.
Cameron Hawley (1905–1969) was simultaneously a businessman who rose through the ranks to become a top executive at Armstrong Cork Company and a prolific author of short stories and articles, which frequently appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, Life, and Good Housekeeping. In his midforties, he decided to devote all of his time to writing. The result was Executive Suite, the bestselling, iconic novel about the dynamic men and women who work at the highest levels of corporate America. Executive Suite was produced as a 1954 motion picture that starred William Holden and Barbara Stanwyck, and was nominated for four Academy Awards. Hawley continued to focus on the themes of free enterprise, big-business adventurers, and the pressures of modern life in his later novels: Cash McCall, which was made into a 1960 film starring James Garner and Natalie Wood; The Lincoln Lords; and The Hurricane Years. Hawley lived for many years on a farm in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where he enjoyed hunting and fly-fishing.