Irv Bender knew the meaning of devotion-he had sacrificed his own chance for a college education so that his beloved brother Babe could go. But it is Irv, not Babe, who will become the family achiever. As half-owner of a summer camp in the Poconos, he earns more than enough to become his brother's keeper...and a discreetly benevolent "uncle" to his partner, Mandy Mershheimer, the novelist; histalented, attractive niece, Suzanne; and his protégé and assistant, Larry Driscoll. But it is the nature of benevolence to breed resentments. And it is the nature of good intentions to frequently yield unforeseen pain. Julia Markus's remarkable novel is a rich, compressed story of the complex relationships between family and friends, and of one man making peace with the past. Uncle won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award in 1978.Julia Markus, an English professor at Hofstra University, received the Houghton Mifflin Literary Award for her first novel, Uncle, which was followed by three well-received novels, American Rose, Friends Along the Way and A Change of Luck, as wellas her critically acclaimed biographies, Dared and Done: The Marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, Across An Untried Sea: Discovering Lives Hidden in the Shadow of Convention and Time and Lady Byron and Her Daughters. She has won a National Endowment for the Arts grant and two National Endowment for the Humanities grants.