William Kittredge – författare

After numerous essays, short stories and the heralded memoir A Hole in the Sky, William Kittredge gives us a debut novel that ratifies his standing as a leading writer of the American West.Rossie Benasco’s horseback existence begins at age 15 and culminates in a thousand-mile drive of more than 200 head of horses through the Rockies into Calgary. It’s a journey that leads him, ultimately, to Eliza Stevenson and a passion so powerful, his previously unfocused life gains clarity and purpose. From the settlers, cowboys, and gamblers who opened up this country to the landholders and politicians who ran it, this is an epic tale of love and wide open spaces that stretches over the grand canvas of the twentieth-century West.From the Trade Paperback edition.

William Kittredge''s stunning memoir is at once autobiography, a family chronicle, and a Westerner''s settling of accounts with the land he grew up in. This is the story of a grandfather whose single-minded hunger for property won him a ranch the size of Delaware but estranged him from his family; of a father who farmed with tractors and drainage ditches but consorted with movie stars; and of Kittredge himself, who was raised by cowboys and saw them become obsolete, who floundered through three marriages, hard drinking, and madness before becoming a writer. Host hauntingly, Hole in the Sky is an honest reckoning of the American myth that drove generations of Americans westward -- and what became of their dream after they reached the edge.From the Trade Paperback edition.

Hailed as one of our finest writers about the American West, William Kittredge now brings all his experience and intelligence to bear on the wider, and wilder, West of our civilization. In certain respects, The Nature of Generosity continues the story of Hole in the Sky, the acclaimed memoir of Kittredge''s early life on his family''s vast ranch in Oregon; but it also ranges freely, and exhilaratingly, around the world and through recorded time.A travel book of sorts--from New York and Venice to the Andalusian hills of García Lorca, from the cow towns of Montana to the caves at Lascaux--it is driven by the quest to reconcile childhood simplicities with the complex, urgent, adult questions about who to be, and how, and why. Drawing on our various histories--biological, cultural, psychological--Kittredge celebrates diversity as the cornerstone of our social possibilities, examines the freedom and responsibility this entails, and suggests that our culture''s habitually selfish, combative behavior is far from being in our best interests--or, indeed, in our nature.Less geographical than philosophical, at once learned and curious, observant and personal, The Nature of Generosity is a revolutionary, and practical, magnum opus.From the Hardcover edition.