Overview
From 1865 to 1950, the multi-faceted world of the American West, its rich, colorful characters, and its many faces - historical, mythic, and cinematic - are captured in the story of a reclusive, elderly photographer and her friend, a writer of Western comic books
Set in 1950, the novel tells the tale of two 'relics' of the old West: Susan Garth, a reclusive octogenarian photographer, and her friend Bark Blaylock, an equally reclusive 75-year-old writer of Western comic books. Their life stories tell the tale of the West, a place of 'silver, space, the epitome of liberty.'
Susan and Bark cross paths with the characters of movies such as Wagonmaster, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. They had also been witness to the slaying of Billy the Kid, the cattle drive along the Chisholm Trail and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
Combining history, fiction, and the fabricated realities of film, Thomson examines the mythic image of the West and its meaning for Americans.Reviews
"The peculiar combination of hype and history that forms the instant myth of the West is the matrix of this engrossing fiction, in which Mr. Thomson combines real characters with those of his own invention, an amalgam as tantalizing as that in E. L. Doctorow's ''Ragtime.''. . . With its rich, handsome prose, this is a book to savor." —New York Times
"Thomson's rangy metafictional collage blends figures from history and legend as well as characters from Hollywood films in an endlessly inventive cinematic meditation on the American West. . . Artfully juxtaposes the brimming frontier of legend against a construct of the West as a constricted wilderness of the soul." —
Publishers WeeklyAuthor Biography
English-American writer David Thomson was educated at Dulwich College and the London School of Film Technique. After seven years at Penguin, he became a Director of Film Studies at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire between 1977 and 1981. Perhaps best known for his magisterial Biographical Dictionary of Film, Thomson is a prolific writer on film including biographies of David O Selznick and Orson Welles, and two books on Hollywood: Beneath Mulholland: Thoughts on Hollywood and Its Ghosts and The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood. Thomson lives in San Francisco with his wife and two sons.
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