At age 10, Harold Hicks was supporting his family by hustling on the inner-city streets of Los Angeles. By the time he arrived in Hawaii at age 34, he was a respected building contractor who founded Hicks Homes, bringing affordable housing to the Islands with more than 20,000 homes for working families. He persevered in his pursuit of the American Dream despite the mental health issues in his own family life—caring for a wife who was in turn irrational, seductive, unpredictable, and even prone to parading naked in public. The House That Hicks Built is a novelization of Harold Hicks’s real rags-to-riches story, as witnessed and told by his daughter, Sharon—the story of the self-made man who in 2006 was named Hawaii’s Most Influential in the previous 50 years.

“…the compelling and engaging story of a young man growing up in Los Angeles during the Great Depression, who rises above his circumstances to become the force that changed Hawaii’s middle class.”

—Wendy Lagareta, educator and community volunteer

Softcover, 240 pp.

Sharon L. Hicks