Please join me in congratulating Ora Smith on the publication of her newest "heritage fiction" book, Unacknowledged, combining elements of a novel with nonfiction! I had the pleasure of helping Ora design the cover. Here's the book description:
In the early 1900s, fourteen-year-old Emma did the impossible to survive. Forced to flee her alcoholic father, she moved to Galveston, Texas, and sold her body to start a new life.
According to history, on Christmas Eve 1905, Howard Hughes Sr. became father to one of America’s most influential tycoons. More than a century later, rumors still abound that his wife never showed any signs of pregnancy. Howard Hughes Jr.’s certificate of baptism exposes a puzzling discrepancy. Now the conceivable and staggering truth of the famous businessman and philanthropist’s origins has been brought to vivid life in a powerful fictional recreation of a tragic scenario.
Author and researcher Ora Smith may well be the great-niece of Howard Hughes. In this dramatized account of the story of the mysterious inventor, engineer, pilot, and ultra-rich recluse, she reveals detailed information and evidence that fill in some of history’s most mystifying blanks. With sections creatively retelling the narrative of the wealthy man’s possibly illicit beginnings juxtaposed with Smith’s meticulous pulling-apart of historical records, you’ll be moved by the sensational and wretched past of this enigmatic icon.
Was Howard Hughes Jr.’s eccentricity born of one young woman’s checkered past?
Unacknowledged: The Possible Biological Mother of Howard Hughes is a thoughtfully written work that dramatically recounts a new theory of the conception and birth of an American legend. If you like true stories stirred with a dash of sensation, bygone eras richly examined, and answers to intriguing questions, then you’ll love Ora Smith’s extraordinary reimagining.
