William Humphrey

The Ordways (eBook, ePUB)

A Novel

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

"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-oldson, 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 fictionin 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.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Open Road Media
• Seitenzahl: 364
• Erscheinungstermin: 17. Februar 2015
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781504006279
• Artikelnr.: 44369001

Autorenporträt

William Humphrey (1924-1997) was born in Clarksville, Texas. Neither of his parents went to school beyond thefifthgrade, and during the height of the Great Depression his father hunted in the snake-infested swamplands of the Sulphur River to help feed the family. Humphrey left Clarksville at age thirteen and did not return for thirty-two years. By then he was the internationally acclaimed author of two extraordinary novels set in his hometown: Home from the Hill, a National Book Award finalist that became an MGM film starring Robert Mitchum, and its follow-up, The Ordways, which the New York Times called "exhilaratingly successful." Eleven highly praised works of fiction and nonfiction followed, including Farther Off from Heaven, a memoir about Humphrey's East Texas boyhood and his father's tragic death in an automobile accident; The Spawning Runand My Moby Dick, two delightful accounts of the joys and travails of fly fishing; and No Resting Place, a novel about the forced removal of the Cherokee nation along the Trail of Tears. A longtime professor of English and writing at Bard College and other schools, Humphrey was the recipient of awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Texas Institute of Arts and Letters.