Feature film debut of Robert Logan, playing the role of "Charles Henry," who had just been signed to a contract with Warner Bros. after being "discovered" while pitching for the Los Angeles City College baseball team according to the AFI Catalog entry for this film.
Arthur Kennedy and Constance Ford had previously played parents of the junior leads in A Summer Place (1959) but had not played a married couple: rather Kennedy had played the husband of Dorothy McGuire and the father of Troy Donahue, while Ford's role had been that of wife to Richard Egan and mother to Sandra Dee. Previously Kennedy and Ford had acted together on Broadway in Arthur Miller's ''Death of a Salesman'' and N. Richard Nash's ''See the Jaguar''.
According to Diane McBain Warner Bros. casting of the title role came down to a choice between McBain and her Ice Palace (1960) co-star Shirley Knight.
Warner Bros. purchased the film rights to the novel by Erskine Caldwell in 1958 (published Boston, 1959) before it was published in late 1959.
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