Foreword
Nearly twenty-five years have passed since the American public was rocked by the publication of a novel called The Blackboard Jungle. Despite the fact that the puritanical censorship laws of the time did not permit the author of this history making novel to tell his story in all its real horror, the book did contain scenes of vicious crime and undisguised sexual violence which successfully shocked an entire generation into a new awareness of the bloody turmoil at the heart of the modern metropolis. The comfortable middle-class reader did not want to believe that young female teachers could be raped and murdered in their own classrooms, but at the time there was plenty of solid evidence that The Blackboard Jungle was not a morbid fantasy or science fiction, but a stunningly, realistic portrait of actual life in a secondary school located in the middle of a slum. a nation can have a multitude of troubles in twenty-live years, and the United States has had more than its share in the last quarter century. Two wars and countless international crises, a nationwide drug menace, economic woes and generational guerrilla warfare all helped to crowd The Blackboard Jungle off the front pages and middle-class citizens tended either to forget completely about the plight of the big city slum school, or to assume that some efficient governmental agency had stepped in and corrected the situation. Little was heard of the ruthless adolescent gangs which had dominated the streets and alleys during the fifties, and the average resident of the peaceful suburbs was beginning to forget that they had ever existed. The Blackboard Jungle was on its way to becoming a bad dream in the historical memory of the American People.
Thus, for the publishers, it was almost an unpleasant shock to receive the manuscript of HOMEWORK FOR TEACHER. True, this particular author had a solid reputation as an in-depth reporter on the social and sexual problems of modern America, and his expertise as a creator of fiction had been demonstrated in a half-a-dozen well received books on a variety of contemporary subjects. But it seemed impossible that anyone today would take the trouble to go back into the slum and look to see if the blackboard still stood in the midst of the jungle or if indeed the jungle was still there at all! Surely this was now all ancient history!
But in the pages of this absorbing, passionately written novel, the publishers found that the unpleasant shock was precisely this: Mr. Andrews had picked up where The Blackboard Jungle left off, plunging even farther into the depths of what happens in a high school which stands in the midst of the ruins of what used to be a city. Ancient history? Look again, reader, our author is talking about current events, things which happened yesterday, are happening right now, and will probably happen again tomorrow.
Naturally, Mr. Andrews' description of gang violence and sexual rapacity could have been expressed in the dry, colorless terms of the sociologist or urban planner. Statistics might have been quoted to show downward trends in adolescent morality or rising rates of crime among students and the result would have been a sober, responsible book which almost no one would have wanted to read. Instead, our author has written a brilliantly imaginative novel describing the explosive sexual tension between three people: A young and sexually attractive female teacher who is facing her first year of work in the city's roughest school; a mild-mannered English instructor who is battling to bring some semblance of civilization and humanity to the wild slum in which he grew up; and a hoodlum with a high l.Q. whom both teachers are trying to turn into a decent human being. The tension is high in quality and intensely sensual in nature. Both of the men involved are in some way in love with the woman; Phil Matthews, the English teacher, is courting her with sensible advice and tickets to the theater, trying desperately to establish his own manhood in the process. Bud Swift, the ex-convict, cannot compete on this level, and is not sure whether he ought to be competing at all. Inside this Hamlet-like character, two forces are at work, slowly and surely tearing the young man in two. Should he concentrate his energies on retaining his reputation as the school's number one tough guy; and go along with a degenerate scheme to kidnap and sexually molest the voluptuous but naive young biology teacher? Or will he opt for the sober dreams laid out for him by Philip Matthews: College, career, respectability, marriage to some nice woman like Miss Kathleen Barton, and a home in the suburbs away from the horror of the slum'. '
Tragically, he tries to do both, learning too late that in the depths of the slum, there are some choices so profound that one must choose cleanly and without compromise. Swift's momentary indecision turns the world around him into a battlefield, and the disputed terrain is the naked and defenseless body of the young biology teacher, an innocent woman who has wandered mistakenly into a hell.
-The Publishers