William Humphrey – författare

National Book Award Finalist: The mesmerizing saga of a Texas family torn apart by passion and pride. Twelve years after Hannah Hunnicutt was committed to a Dallas asylum, her body is brought home to northeast Texas to be buried alongside those of her husband and son. Etched on all three gravestones is the same date of death: May 28, 1939.  Home from the Hill is the story of that tragic day and the dramatic events leading up to it. The biggest landowner in the county, Captain Wade Hunnicutt was a charismatic war hero whose legendary hunting skills extended to the wives of his friends and neighbors. Humiliated by her husband’s philandering, Hannah grew to despise Captain Wade but was too proud to ask for a divorce; instead, she devoted herself to her only child. Torn between his mother’s adoration and an overwhelming need to win his father’s approval, Theron tried to become his own man. And he might have succeeded if he hadn’t fallen in love with the beautiful and innocent Libby Halstead.   William Humphrey’s dazzling debut novel, the inspiration for a major motion picture starring Robert Mitchum, is a masterpiece of twentieth-century American literature, as intense and thrilling as the Hunnicutts themselves.This ebook features an illustrated biography of William Humphrey including rare photos form the author’s estate.

“Good writing is rare enough. Storytelling is an even rarer skill. A genuinely comic vision is beyond price. The Ordways has all three.” —Time On the annual graveyard-working day in Clarksville, Texas, families come from all over East Texas to pay respects to their loved ones. The Ordways are one such clan, and in this eloquent and original novel, our narrator recounts the story of how he and his kin arrived in this magical land where the South meets the West.   The tale begins with his great-grandfather, Thomas Ordway, who lost his sight at the Battle of Shiloh and vowed to quit Tennessee forever. He crossed the Red River into Texas and stopped on the edge of the featureless prairie, a landscape too mystifying even for a sightless man. Years later, the narrator’s grandfather, Sam Ordway, was forced to leave the forest behind when his three-year-old son, Ned, was kidnapped by a neighbor. Sam scoured the vast state of Texas in search of Ned but never found the boy. The mystery of what happened to him and what his long-hoped-for return might mean to the Ordways brings William Humphrey’s brilliant second novel to its rich and satisfying conclusion.   A masterful blend of comedy, tragedy, and history, The Ordways is great American fiction in the tradition of William Faulkner and Mark Twain.   This ebook features an illustrated biography of William Humphrey including rare photos form the author’s estate.

“A big, rich, satisfying, old-fashioned hunk of a book . . . part comedy, part tragedy, and thoroughly satisfying.” —Chicago Tribune Book World A Texas family as big and brash as their home state, the Renshaws are united by their fierce loyalty to one another and their ruthlessness in destroying anyone who threatens their interests.   When the Renshaw matriarch, Edwina, takes to her deathbed, her ten children are summoned home to stand vigil. Past humiliations and long-simmering resentments soon boil to the surface—a son’s forbidden love affair destroyed by his imperious mother, a daughter’s dutiful attentions greeted with nothing but disdain. But the most painful wound of all is the absence of Kyle, Edwina’s favorite son and the only member of the family to leave Texas. What drove him away, and can his siblings get him home in time to see his mother before she dies?   As the ties that bind the indomitable Renshaws stretch and fray, Proud Flesh builds to a stunning climax of passion and violence. It is an unforgettable story, and one of William Humphrey’s finest. This ebook features an illustrated biography of William Humphrey including rare photos form the author’s estate.

William Humphrey’s acclaimed memoir is a richly detailed portrait of small-town Texas and a poignant account of the tragedy that shaped the author’s life  At three o’clock in the morning on July 5, 1937, William Humphrey awoke to his mother’s urgent cry: “Get dressed as quick as you can! Your daddy has been hurt.” Rushing to the doctor’s office, mother and son arrived to find Clarence Humphrey battered beyond recognition: his chest crushed, his face bruised black and caked with blood, his teeth shattered. He soon drew his final breath.   In that terrible moment, thirteen-year-old William knew that nothing would ever be the same again: “I felt slip from me in that moment not only the certainty of my future but the fixity of my past. It was as if I had been wakened out of my childhood.” He moved with his mother to Dallas soon after, and although he set his classic novels, Home from the Hill and The Ordways, in his hometown of Clarksville, he would not return for thirty-two years.   A masterpiece of autobiography, Farther Off from Heaven is the fiercely honest, exquisitely crafted story of William Humphrey’s childhood and the sudden end of his innocence. This ebook features an illustrated biography of William Humphrey including rare photos form the author’s estate.

A father bravely confronts an unthinkable tragedyin William Humphrey’s most heart-wrenching novel. In the aftermath of his son’s suicide, Ben Curtis returns to the upstate New York fishing lodge that holds some of his happiest memories. It has been two years since his last visit, and Ben—thirty pounds lighter, his dark hair turned white—is barely recognizable to people who have fished alongside him for twenty summers. For the first time in all those years, he has made the trip alone.   Over the course of the weekend, as Ben tramps through the forest and relearns the secrets of catching trout, he recalls the joys of the past and reckons with the grim reality of the present. Anthony, a Princeton freshman who inherited his father’s love of the outdoors, is gone. So too is the man he was named after: Tony Thayer, Ben’s best friend and former fishing companion. And Ben has no idea where his wife, Cathy, might be. In the wake of Anthony’s death, their already-strained marriage fell apart. Where does a man turn when everything he put his faith in—friends, family, love—is destroyed? In the exhilaration of fly casting into an icy mountain stream, Ben hopes to find the answer. Hailed by the Chicago Tribune as “a desperate, impressive, astonishing book,” Hostages to Fortune is a profound and deeply moving meditation on the art of survival.   This ebook features an illustrated biography of William Humphrey including rare photos form the author’s estate.

The essential anthology of early short fiction by an American master Set primarily in Texas and Oklahoma during the Great Depression, these extraordinary stories display the unique blend of irony, nostalgia, and sharp-edged lyricism that established William Humphrey as one of America’s finest chroniclers of small-town life.   In “The Last Husband,” a bright-eyed newlywed bears witness to the cynical intrigues of an older married couple. “The Human Fly” is the darkly humorous story of a young man’s misguided attempt to create a new identity for himself in the rural Texas community where his name has become a running joke. “Quail for Mr. Forester” is the tender and precisely detailed portrait of a young Southern boy yearning for the glorious past he never knew. In “The Rainmaker,” a self-proclaimed professor of the elements is tarred, feathered, and run out of town for raising a dust storm instead of delivering the promised downpour. He escapes across the Red River and finally succeeds in bringing an end to the drought, only to be forced to flee yet again when a three-day deluge results in disastrous flooding.    Marked by the same originality and artistry that distinguished Home from the Hill and The Ordways as two of the finest novels in American literature, The Collected Stories of William Humphrey is a testament to the breathtaking scope of its author’s vision and the graceful precision of his craft. This ebook features an illustrated biography of William Humphrey including rare photos form the author’s estate.

A Scottish-Cherokee boy accompanies his grandparents on the Trail of Tears in this “superb” novel by the New York Times–bestselling author of The Ordways (Time).   Twelve-year-old Amos Ferguson is a blond, blue-eyed boy of mixed Cherokee and Scottish heritage, the son of a physician and the grandson of a gentleman farmer. Despite wealth and education, however, the family has no recourse when a drifter forges a bill of sale to their plantation: Georgia state law forbids anyone with Native American blood from testifying in court.   Amos and his grandparents are relocated to a squalid internment camp and forced to join their tribe on a long and brutal march to the Indian Territory west of the Mississippi. Along the way, the doctor’s son tends to the sick as thousands perish from disease, starvation, and exhaustion. In the Republic of Texas, he bears witness to the doomed last stand of Chief Bowles and his band of Cherokee, who refuse to sacrifice the lands promised them by Sam Houston.   More than a century later, Amos’s great-great-grandson narrates the story of his ancestor’s harrowing journey and heroic survival, in “a novel every American should be required to read” that brings a shameful chapter of US history to life (Los Angeles Times). From the National Book Award–nominated author of Home from the Hill and Farther Off from Heaven, No Resting Place “is more than one boy's story; it is the story of a nation dispossessed and brought to its knees by the greed and power of another” (Library Journal).This ebook features an illustrated biography of William Humphrey including rare photos form the author’s estate.

From one of America’s most acclaimed authors comes a masterful collection of bittersweet tales about the autumn of life In the exquisite title story, seventy-six-year-old Virginia Tyler will finally marry the love of her life—as soon as she finds the courage to leave her husband of almost fifty years. In “The Apple of Discord,” a Hudson Valley farmer, heartsick that none of his three daughters or their husbands wants to keep the family orchard, commits an act of desperation.“Vissi d’Arte” is the poignant story of a husband whose belief that his wife is destined to become a world-famous painter borders on the delirious. In “A Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man,” an aging writer realizes that the young reporter sent from the big-city newspaper to interview him is gathering material for his obituary. The lies he tells her are a delicious act of defiance.    By turns tender, funny, and sad, September Song is William Humphrey at his most eloquent and empathetic. This ebook features an illustrated biography of William Humphrey including rare photos form the author’s estate.

William Humphrey’s delightful chronicle of an angling holiday in Wales celebrates two equally astonishing creatures: the Atlantic salmon and the British fly fisherman  In order to mate in the same freshwater stream where it was spawned, the salmon swims one thousand miles or more and overcomes countless obstacles, from trawling nets to twelve-foot-high waterfalls. To catch the King of Fish at the end of its incredible journey, the Anglo-Saxon angler subjects his pride, his bank account, and his taste buds—poached milk, anyone?—to similar dangers. Nine out of ten salmon do not make it back to the sea once their spawning run is finished; nine out of ten sportsmen return to the hotel empty handed when the fishing day is done.   And yet, year after year, they return to the rivers and streams of Great Britain—fish and angler both. Why? Perhaps “poor Holloway,” who has yet to land a salmon after twenty spawning seasons but whose success rate with the bored wives of more skillful fisherman is scandalously impressive, knows the answer.   An elegant blend of fishing narrative, travelogue, and character study, The Spawning Run is a hilarious and heartfelt tribute to the irresistible passions that unite us all: man, woman, and salmon.   This ebook features an illustrated biography of William Humphrey including rare photos form the author’s estate.

From the acclaimed author of Home from the Hill and The Ordways comes a charming and erudite account of what happens when the fish hooks the fisherman In the Berkshire mountains, novelist and avid outdoorsman William Humphrey discovers a gigantic, one-eyed brown trout lazing in the shallows of a roadside stream. Between three and four feet long and weighing more than thirty pounds, it is a fish too big not to be fished for. It is also, therefore, a fish too big to be caught.   Yet Humphrey resolves to do just that, and with a dry fly, no less. What follows is a season-long pursuit of the impossible as the amateur angler practices his technique, devises schemes for getting old One-eye to bite, and steels himself for the climactic showdown. Man and trout will find that they have much to learn from each other.   One of the finest fishing stories ever published, My Moby Dick is a small masterpiece about a whale of a fish. This ebook features an illustrated biography of William Humphrey including rare photos form the author’s estate.