The Guarded Heights

George Morton grows up around horses, and when his family’s livery trade collapses under the arrival of the automobile, he is left with little but ambition and a job caring for the mounts on the wealthy Planter estate. His infatuation with Sylvia Planter, the proud daughter of the house, hardens into a resolve to climb far enough to meet her as an equal. Camp traces that ascent from stable yard through Princeton to fortune and social standing, weighing the cost of self-invention against the pride that both drives and isolates his hero. Published in 1921, the book works as a study of class, desire, and American self-making in the years around the First World War. Readers drawn to period romance built on social ambition will find its central pairing, part antagonism and part longing, genuinely absorbing.