Major Works
- Camp Re-Form (2012)
- Yocona Puff Adder (2006)
Biography
Gerald Inmon was born in Oxford, Mississippi, and he and his wife currently reside there. Inmon earned a bachelor’s degree in forestry and a master’s degree in wildlife management at Mississippi State University. He then became a professional forester and wildlife biologist in the state, but he is now retired. During the Vietnam War, he served in the military in the 101st Airborne Division.
Inmon’s first book, Yocona Puff Adder, is a work of fiction of 508 pages told in the first person. The publisher states that the novel is based on real-life events and twisted historical truths and is a coming-of-age novel. The characters’s names are only slightly camouflaged. The fifty-one chapters are almost short stories in themselves. The setting is segregated Mississippi in and around Oxford and the story of two motherless boys, one white and one black. The Yocona and Little Tallahatchie Rivers are important in their lives.
Curtis Wilkie, University of Mississippi Cook Chair of Journalism, states, “Yocona Puff Adder has a lot of Huck Finn in it. The tale is rich with folksy anecdote and involves two boys, one white, the other black, as they come of age and recognize that race is a critical factor of life in the rural South. The locale is obviously Oxford, Mississippi, and though the characters have been given fictitious names, some of them, such as William Faulkner, are easily recognized in a fascinating town where Inmon, himself, grew up during an interesting period in history.”
Camp Re-Form, according to Inmon, is “a character driven book about seven fifteen-year old boys you’ll learn to love as they struggle with everything from their efforts at honor and duty to mere survival, while they are sentenced to a judge-ordered Boy Scout camp in lieu of reform school.”