The Seven League Boots: A novel - Hardcover

Murray, Albert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679439862 ISBN 13: 9780679439868

Publisher: Pantheon, 1996

Synopsis

The break-out novel by an unrecognized master--"a fictional tale spinner in the grand Southern tradition" (Washington Post Book World). Told from the point of view of a young Alabama college graduate in the 1920s, this brilliant novel recounts the exploits of a legendary jazz composer and his band on a tour that becomes a heroic journey "equivalent to the seven league strides of heroes in rocking chair story times."

About this title

Review:

Jazz and fiction haven't invariably made a happy marriage. Often the jazz element seems incidental--an excuse to set the denouement in a smoky nightclub. Every now and then, however, a book appears in which the very texture of the prose is inseparable from the music, and Albert Murray's The Seven League Boots is a perfect example. The third and penultimate installment in a series, the novel revolves around an Alabama-bred bass player named Scooter. When the story opens, the Swing Era is in full flower. Scooter has just graduated from college, and he's immediately enlisted to play with the Bossman--a pianist and composer with a more-than-casual resemblance to Duke Ellington. Like Ellington's music, Murray's prose is a marvelous mixture of lyrical and gutbucket tonalities. And as the Bossman's orchestra tours the United States, Scooter undertakes a journey of discovery, in which centuries of American history are comically or tragically encapsulated.

About the Author:

Albert Murray has been O'Connor Professor of Literature at Colgate University, visiting professor of literature at the University of Massachusetts, writer-in-residence at Emory University, and Paul Anthony Brick Lecturer at the University of Missouri.

About this edition

• Publisher: Pantheon
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0679439862
• ISBN 13: 9780679439868
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 369