Don Tracy was born Donald Fiske Tracy in 1905 and died in 1976. He is an american writter and a scriptwritter. He is really famous for his hardboileds. He has many pseudonym like Tom Tricker, Tracy Mason, Marion Small,… He did many very different jobs (bodyguard, journalist, estate agent, model in advertisings,…) and during the Second World War he belonged to a detachment of Military Police.

How sleeps the beast is one of first novel which deals with racism at the time of the author. It’s too about violence, alcoholism and the search of identity. For Don Tracy racism generates violence. This idear is really showed in this book with a lynching on a black man. Some times is very hard to read this novel because you really realize that our world can be just horrible with wild, brutal behavior. You can be digusted with sadism employed by people on a weakness person. You remark too a collective cowardice and you can’t think that it has already been but it’s true! In America lynchings were common from 1880 to 1950.

I can’t summarize the novel but I can say to you that even if it can be hard to read  because of horror, it is a very interesting novel and personally I can’t stop reading when I began it.