Sixty Acres and a Barn is Alfred Lewis' long-awaited posthumous novel. Completed in the years before the author's death in 1977, this evocative narrative tells the coming-of-age story of Luis Sarmentro, an immigrant who finds in America a place of tolerance, prosperity and emotional fulfillment. This slice of immigrant life in California dairy farming is rendered memorably in prose at once insightful, lyrical and realistic in its representation of obstacles faced by those who lived in isular enclaves between cultures. Sixty Acres moves beyond the idealized homeland of his first novel, Home is an Island (1951), and constitutes a serious contribution to postwar ethnic literature, making Lewis the precursor of acclaimed writes like Katherine Vaz and Frank X. Gasper

Praise for Sixty Acres and A Barn

"Through Lewis, the world of the small immigrant dairy farms and the newly-arrived Portuguese who worked them live on the page forever. Memorable are the old, crusty ex-whaler and dairyman Madruga, the town's barber and pimp, Senhor de Castro, the lovely and love-crossed Ana Linhares, and a host of other characters (one things of Steinbeck's Cannery Row!) in this rich California valley."
-- Frank X. Gaspar, author of Leaving Pico

"Sixty Acres and a Barn, Alfred Lewis' last novel, offers up an immigrant's version of the Horatio Alger myth, in which an Azorean stranger learns the pragmatic ways of a new country, a bit of essential knowledge that, melding with his elemental Azorean traits, enables him to become a prosperous and productive citizen of California. In theis well-plotted western, agrarian novel, the reader discovers as well how Alfredo Luís evolved into Alfred Lewis without ever ceasing to be, in the best of senses, a Portuguese immigrant from the Azores.
-- George Monteiro, author of The Presence of Pessoa