About this item
"Sheds brilliant light along the meteoric path of American westward expansion. . . . [A] pithy, compact beautifully conducted version of the American Dream, from its portrait of the young wounded soldier in the beginning to its powerful rendering of Crazy Horse's prophecy for life on earth at the end." - NPR"Like all Mr. Lock's books, this is an ambitious work, where ideas crowd together on the page like desperate men on a battlefield." - Wall Street JournalIn this panoramic tale of Manifest Destiny, Stephen Moran comes of age with the young country that he crosses on the Union Pacific, just as the railroad unites the continent. Propelled westward from his Brooklyn neighborhood and the killing fields of the Civil War to the Battle of Little Big Horn, he befriends Walt Whitman, receives a medal from General Grant, becomes a bugler on President Lincoln's funeral train, goes to work for railroad mogul Thomas Durant, apprentices with frontier photographer William Henry Jackson, and stalks General George Custer.
About the Author
"[Norman Lock's fiction] shimmers with glorious language, fluid rhythms, and complex insights." (NPR) Lock's AMERICAN NOVELS SERIES"Lock has embarked on a fascinating intellectual and artistic endeavor: engaging American writers from the 19th century through a series of speculative historical novels. . . ." (Library Journal) AUTHOR'S NOTEThe best of our nineteenth-century literature was not small, nor did it consider ethical, political, or social ideas outside the jurisdiction of fiction. My ambition is to confer on readers a larger view of the American present by writing essential stories of a nation being violently made and remade and to undertake the rescue from oblivion certain experiences missing from the national memory. *Lock won The Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction and has been awarded writing fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. *FEAST DAY OF THE CANNIBALS (July 2019) "Transfixing. . . . This historically authentic novel raises potent questions about sexuality during an unsettling era in American history past and is another impressive entry in Lock's dissection of America's past." (Publishers Weekly) THE WRECKAGE OF EDEN (June 2019) "Lock deftly tells a visceral story of belief and conflict, with abundant moments of tragedy and transcendence along the way." (Kirkus Reviews) A FUGITIVE IN WALDEN WOODS (June 2017) "Unflinching, penetrative, and bravely earnest. . . . With melodic prose that marvelously captures [the narrator's] searing insights and rich observations, Lock's imaginative novel is a stunning meditation on idealism and the cost of humanity." (Publishers Weekly, starred and boxed review, Pick of the Week) THE PORT-WINE STAIN (June 2016) "Lock's novel engages not merely with [Edgar Poe] but with decadent fin de siècle art and modernist literature that raised philosophical and moral questions about the metaphysical relations among art, science and human consciousness. The reader is just as spellbound by Lock's story as [his novel's narrator] is by Poe's . . . in this mesmerizingly twisted, richly layered homage to a pioneer of American Gothic fiction." (New York Times Book Review) AMERICAN METEOR (June 2015) "Like all Mr. Lock's books, this is an ambitious work, where ideas crowd together on the page like desperate men on a battlefield." (Wall Street Journal) THE BOY IN HIS WINTER (May 2014) ". . . one of the most interesting writers out there. This time, he re-imagines Huck Finn's journeys, transporting the iconic character deep into America's past--and future." (Reader's Digest) LEARN MORE ABOUT LOCK'S AMERICAN NOVELS at Bellevue Literary Press: https://blpress.org/authors/norman-lock/
