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Summary
Summary
Annie Dillard has called him "one of our finest writers." Jane Smiley has declared his voice "prophetic." Now, at long last--after two collections of stories, another two of essays, and the heralded memoirA Hole in the Sky--William Kittredge gives us his first novel: an epic that stretches over the twentieth century, from the settlers, cowboys, and gamblers who opened up this country to the landholders and politicians who ran it. Rossie Benasco's horseback existence begins when he's fifteen and culminates in a thousand-mile drive of more than two hundred head of horses through the Rockies into Calgary, through Oregon, Idaho, and Montana, across virgin wilderness, failed homesteads, ghost towns, squatters' camps, and Indian settlements. It's a journey that leads him, ultimately, to Eliza Stevenson and a love so powerful that his vocational aimlessness is focused only by his desire to spend his life with her: whether on her family ranch in the Bitterroot, which will prove their best refuge from a century fraught with war and civil strife, or on sojourns in Hawaii and Guam during World War II, or in the horse-trading business in California, or on the campaign trail throughout Montana. A novel rich with landscapes and characters,The Willow Fieldchronicles a way of life nearly extinct at the novel's beginning and surviving only in memory upon its close at century's end. And as these people pivot between the ghosts of the old frontier and the modern world that engulfs them--from the uprooted lives of the Blackfeet tribes left listless and betrayed to the ravages of war, McCarthyism, urban riots, and insidious land development--the perennial imperatives of ambition, responsibility, and love prove as vital as ever, revealed as they are with the conviction, humor, and humanity for which Kittredge has long been acclaimed.
Author Notes
William Kittredge was an American writer, born August 14, 1932 in Portland, Oregon. He grew up in Portland and was a rancher until he was 35. He graduated from Oregon State University with a degree in agriculture, and from the University of Iowa with a M.F.A. He spent most of his life in Montana. He spent most of his life in Montana. He taught creative writing at the University of Montana in Missoula, MT for 30 years.
His writing focused on the west. He wrote fourteen books, and published essays and articles in major magazines and newspapers. His work includes novels, Phantom Silver (1987) and The Willow Field (2007). His nonfiction includes Owning it All (1987), Hole in the Sky: A Memoir (1992), The Nature of Generosity (2001), and The Next Rodeo: New and Selected Essays (2006). He edited an anthology with Annick Smith, The Last Best Place: A Montana Anthology (1990).
His awards included a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford and Writing Fellowships from the Endowment for the Arts. In 2017, received a Lifetime Achievement Award the at Montana Book Festival.
William Kittredge died on December 4, 2020 in Missoula, Montana. He was 88 years old.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Memoirist and story writer Kittredge's first novel (after The Nature of Generosity and Hole in the Sky) tells the life story of Rossie Benasco, the ornery son of a Reno, Nev., casino pit boss who, at age 15 in the early 1930s, takes work as a "wrango boy" at a Nevada ranch owned by retired rodeo legend Slivers Flynn. Rossie's intimate relationship with Slivers's daughter causes Slivers to give Rossie a choice: run a couple hundred horses to Calgary or stay and "have a mess of redheaded kids." Rossie chooses the thousand-mile trek and, at trail's end, falls for Eliza Stevenson, the beautiful and pregnant (the father "went batshit" and is in prison for assault) daughter of a Scottish businessman. Eliza's father deeds the family's Montana farm to Rossie to nudge him into marrying Eliza, and the couple seal their relationship with the birth of a son and a wedding. Kittredge moves Rossie along with a compelling confidence: Rossie learns to run a farm, watches his son mature and adopts an orphaned girl before joining the Marine Corps in December 1941; he is shot by a fellow soldier and spends most of his tour working as a supply clerk. Years later, his children grown, Rossie gets involved in local and state politics, which proves to be as perilous as the Pacific theater. Kittredge balances earthy dialogue with lyrical prose to create a memorable evocation of the American west. (Oct. 6) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Rossie Benasco, a young man in Reno in the 1930s, turns his back on school and family and goes off "to be his own man with horses." But women get in the way. That premise stands behind much of western literature. Sometimes it's expressed in the formulaic terms of genre fiction, and other times, as in Kittredge's luminous first novel, it opens up an exploration of the magnetic fields that draw people together and push them apart. Kittredge's multigenerational saga begins with a stunning set piece--a classic horse drive, more than 200 head, from Nevada to Calgary. Rossie, a veteran ranch hand but still barely 20, signs on for the drive as a way of breaking ties with a girl and winds up forging even stronger ties with another girl, Eliza Stevenson, the unmarried but pregnant daughter of a rancher in Montana's Bitterroot Mountains. "We could be it, entirely it," Eliza says shortly after she meets Rossie, and as we watch their lives unfold, from the Depression through World War II and on into the 1960s, we realize that this strong-willed woman was both right and wrong. Like Birkin and Ursula in D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love0 , Rossie and Eliza are "entirely it," but--fiery individuals both--they are also in perpetual conflict, cherishing their union just as they struggle not to be consumed by the other. This transcendent love story is at the heart of Kittredge's novel, but it is set against not one but two imposing landscapes--the Bitterroot and the Nevada desert, both of which demand their own allegiance from the characters' minds and hearts. Readers of Kittredge's acclaimed memoirs of growing up in the West, including the classic A Hole in the Sky 0 (1994), have been anticipating his first novel for years. "Go to horses with no rush," Rossie's mentor explains to him, "but no fucking around, that's the deal." Kittredge knows that deal, and he gets it exactly right. --Bill Ott Copyright 2006 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Kittredge (English & creative writing, Univ. of Montana; Hole in the Sky: A Memoir) uses strong, earthy language to tell the story of Rossie Benasco. This is a cowboy romance told as a man would tell it, but the tale doesn't end when boy gets girl (or vice versa); it goes on to cover Rossie's whole life and the lives of his wife and children. It's as if Kittredge is using the form of the novel to give an extended lecture laying his meanings between the lines like a modern Ernest Hemingway saying, "this is life in all its aimless glory." Love, sorrow, frustration, the compromises that men and women make to live together, horses, politics, friendship, the look and feel of the West (notably, Montana) between 1933 and 1991 it's all here. The title is a metaphor for endurance and suffering and possibly a form of guardianship that permeates Rossie's existence, and by extension, the West that he represents. Kittredge is a distinguished proponent of Western life; winner of writing fellowships from Stanford and the National Endowment for the Arts; and coproducer of the 1992 movie A River Runs Through It. Recommended for all collections about the West. Ken St. Andre, Phoenix P.L. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.