Chateau Laux is a novel based on a shocking event in the lives of a first-generation family in the American colonies. Lawrence Kraymer is a young entrepreneur from Philadelphia who takes a hunting trip up along the Delaware, and in the process, stumbles on Pierre Laux, a French aristocrat living on the edge of what was then a vast wilderness. Intoxicated with this exotic family, Lawrence pursues an engagement with one of Pierre's daughters, and builds her a château in a misguided attempt to prove himself worthy. In so doing, he sets in motion a sequence of events that has tragic consequences in this literary treatment of an actual historical incident.
