Butcher's crossing

Format:

Audio disc

Title:

Butcher's crossing

Author:

Williams, John, 1922-1994.

ISBN:

9781441753441

9781441753465

Publication Information:

[Ashland, OR] : Blackstone Audio, ℗2010.

Physical Description:

9 audio discs (approximately 10.5 hr.) : digital ; 4 3/4 in.

General Note:

Unabridged.

Compact discs.

Duration: 10:30:00.

"Tracks Every 3 Minutes for Easy Bookmarking"--Container.

Summary:

In the 1870s, 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 full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. One of these men regales Will with tales of the immense buffalo herds hidden away in the Colorado Rockies and convinces him to join an expedition to track them down. At the end of a grueling journey, the men reach a place of paradisal richness, where they abandon themselves to an orgy of slaughter. So caught up in killing buffalo that they lose all sense of time, the men are overtaken by winter and snowed in. In the 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.

Subject(s):

American bison hunting -- Fiction.

Wilderness survival -- Fiction.

Genre:

Added Author:

Holds:

Available:*

Library	Call Number	Status
Searching... Woodburn Public Library	Williams	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

In his National Book Award-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.

Author Notes

John Williams was born in Clarksville, Texas on August 29, 1922. He enlisted in the United States Army Air Forces in 1942 and spent two and a half years as a sergeant in India and Burma. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1949 and a Master of Arts degree in 1950 from the University of Denver. During this time, his first two books were published: Nothing but the Night in 1948 and The Broken Landscape in 1949. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Missouri in 1954. He taught at the University of Denver from 1954 until his retirement in 1985. His other books include Butcher's Crossing, Stoner, and The Necessary Lie. His historical novel Augustus won the National Book Award for fiction in 1973. He also edited the anthology English Renaissance Poetry and was the founding editor of the Denver Quarterly. He died of respiratory failure on March 3, 1994.

(Bowker Author Biography)