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Loading... Butcher's Crossing (original 1960; edition 1960)by John Williams (Author)
Work InformationButcher's Crossing by John Williams (1960)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. A young Harvard graduate searches for meaning in the white, white snow of the Colorado mountains in 1873. He is joined by three seasoned - in buffalo hunting or whiskey - men who are each also searching (for God, for money, for power). But in the end, only the search for meaning allows for any hope of salvation... The writing is fluid and vivid, the characters are well drawn and the plot pulls you along while allowing plenty of wide open spaces of meditation. Really good read, slow and methodical, yet just as it should be! Will Anderson, young and looking for adventure, travels out from Boston and Harvard, to the West, to end up in the town of Butcher's Crossing. He puts up money for a buffalo hunt, and he and three others set off. All three end up getting more than just the hunt! It's a nice ol' western story, full of descriptive details and scenery. At times, I felt saddle sore and dust covered as I read along. Could almost smell the gunpowder too! Strong sense of place on each and every page. Good last line too! "He rode forward without hurry, and felt behind him the sun slowly rise and harden the air." Ahh...
Is contained inContainsDistinctions
Classic Literature.
Fiction.
Western.
HTML: In his National Book Awardâ??winning novel Augustus, John Williams uncovered the secrets of ancient Rome. With Butcher's Crossing, his fiercely intelligent, beautifully written western, Williams dismantles the myths of modern America. It is the 1870s, and Will Andrews, fired up by Emerson to seek "an original relation to nature," drops out of Harvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher's Crossing, a small Kansas town on the outskirts of nowhere. Butcher's Crossing is full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. Before long Andrews strikes up a friendship with one of them, a man who regales Andrews with tales of immense herds of buffalo, ready for the taking, hidden away in a beautiful valley deep in the Colorado Rockies. He convinces Andrews to join in an expedition to track the animals down. The journey out is grueling, but at the end is a place of paradisiacal richness. Once there, however, the three men abandon themselves to an orgy of slaughter, so caught up in killing buffalo that they lose all sense of time. Winter soon overtakes them: they are snowed in. Next spring, half-insane with cabin fever, cold, and hunger, they stagger back to Butcher's Crossing to find a world as irremediably changed as they have been. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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In this book, Williams presents a young man on a quest for self discovery through the old west. He faces winter of brutal hardship and unbearable boredom.
His return to civilzation finds him unable to truly connect with others.
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