Hard Scrabble : Observations on a Patch of Land / John Graves.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Graves, John, 1920-2013, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Country life--Texas--Somervell County.

Country life.

Authors, American--20th century--Biography.

Authors, American.

Somervell County (Tex.)--Social life and customs.

Somervell County (Tex.).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (288 p.)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Austin, TX : University of Texas Press, 2016.

Summary:

“A kind of homemade book—imperfect like a handmade thing, a prize. It’s a galloping, spontaneous book, on occasion within whooping distance of that greatest and sweetest of country books, Ivan Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Notebook.” —Edward Hoagland, New York Times Book Review “His subjects are trees and brush, hired help, fences, soil, armadillos and other wildlife, flood and drought, local history, sheep and goats . . . and they come to us reshaped and reenlivened by his agreeably individual (and sometimes cranky) notions.” —New Yorker “If Goodbye to a River was in some sense Graves’s Odyssey, this book is his [version of Hesiod’s] Works and Days. It is partly a book about work, partly a book about nature, but mostly a book about belonging. In the end John Graves has learned to belong to his patch of land so thoroughly that at moments he can sense in himself a unity with medieval peasants and Sumerian farmers, working with their fields by the Tigris.” —Larry McMurtry, Washington Post Book World “Hard Scrabble is hard pastoral of the kind we have learned to recognize in Wordsworth, Frost, Hemingway, and Faulkner. It celebrates life in accommodation with a piece of the ‘given’ creation, a recalcitrant four hundred or so acres of Texas cedar brake, old field, and creek bottom, which will require of any genuine resident all the character he can muster.” —Southwest Review

Contents:

Frontmatter

Dedication

Contents

1. By Way if Introduction

2. A Comment

3. Used to Be

4. The Forging of a Squirren

5. Of the Lay of Things, and a Creek

6. Ghosts

7. A Rooted Population

8. An Irrelevance

9. Hoof and Paw, Tooth and Claw, Little Creatures Everywhere

10. His Chapter

11. Helpers

12. 2 x 4

13. Another Irrelevance

14. The War with Mother N.

15. Interlude: Our own Pippa passes at the age of seven or so—a sop for those who would have preferred a happy homestead sort of book...

16. The War Resumed

17. What Happened to Mother N.'s Own Boy?

18. Reality as Viewed Darkly Through Old Snuff-Bottle Shards

Afterword by the Author (2002)

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781477309605

1477309608

9781477309599

1477309594

OCLC:

933295509