From the 1950 first-edition dust jacket: Tough, yet sympathetic and moving, The Dog Star is a perceptive novel of a young boy's search for strength and independence in a lonely, thwarted life.

Fifteen-year-old Blackie Pride was determined to make himself strong and independent like the strange, aloof boy he had known at the Country Farm School. After the tragic death of the boy, Blackie escaped from school, returned home, and joined his old friends, Dusty and Hatchet, who led a life of petty delinquency. But his drive for independence made him break away to be on his own. Yet even then he didn't find what he was so desperately seeking. His sordid affair with a girl he picked up in a roadhouse only disgusted him. He got a job for a short time, then quit--again to be independent. And his effort to break completely with Dusty and Hatchet resulted in violence.

Donald Windham has handled his theme surely and sensitively, with a fine feeling for the motives, passions, and desires of a lonely boy groping for security in a complex and corrupt world.