Raised in Kansas, Pebbles at the Beach is a collection of sixty-five poems by the author Steven Thomas Dykes. "Poetry, the eldest sister of all arts and parent of most" (Congreve). This was my introduction into becoming an artist-my first love. This novel dates back over a decade to when I was in my infancy of writing, and it followed me on a search for meaning and purpose through my travels across the great highways of the United States of America to even crossing the pond to sit in the Pere La-Chaisse cemetery in Paris, France, next to Oscar Wilde's gravesite. These one hundred four poems aim to express the life I lived from the age of eighteen to the age of twenty-eight.