Heart of the Country
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- Synopsis
- To the unsettled plains of Kansas in 1854 comes a man with a vision of civilization, a town builder and dreamer who, while establishing a settlement for the pioneers to follow, undoes his chances of acceptance among his own people by sharing his bed with a squaw. Abandonment of this woman (and subsequently their child) serves only to disgrace him further, and the founder of Valley Forge departs for other, more welcome horizons. The child is raised by Dr. Cobden of St. Louis, a man of wealth and reputation whose professional and private lives are similarly undone from the moment he adopts the half-breed boy, who acquires with age the unkind malformation of the hunchback. While the doctor is absent during the Civil War years, young Joseph comes to realize he is unlike his peers, a bitter awakening from which he fashions a turtle-like resistance to a world seemingly set against him. At the age of fifteen, an exile within his own tortured shape, Joe Cobden seeks a new life in the West, and becomes in turn a woodcutter, a bouncer in Mrs. Attucks's busy brothel, and--his ambition achieved at last--a buffalo hunter. This occupation is at first kind to Joe; he builds a reputation from the slaughtered herds, but when the buffalo are hunted almost to extinction he is obliged to follow the less rewarding pursuit of bone gathering. Alone by choice, without plans of any kind, Joe is drawn by circumstance to the place of his birth, and here, partly by accident, partly by cruel design, he is presented with the chance to stake out a future for himself. In Greg Matthews's skilled and certain hands a magnificent novel emerges from the unheroic story of the West. The usual mythic exaggerations and romance are abandoned for a reality that is harsh, true, and utterly compulsive.
- Copyright:
- 1985
Book Details
- Book Quality:
- Excellent
- Book Size:
- 532 Pages
- ISBN-13:
- 9780393022896
- Publisher:
- W. W. Norton & Company Limited
- Date of Addition:
- 07/22/10
- Copyrighted By:
- Greg Matthews
- Adult content:
- No
- Language:
- English
- Has Image Descriptions:
- No
- Categories:
- Westerns, Literature and Fiction
- Submitted By:
- Kari G
- Proofread By:
- mary stephens
- Usage Restrictions:
- This is a copyrighted book.