Bone By Bone

Matthiessen, Peter

ISBN 10: 0375501029 / ISBN 13: 9780375501029

Published by Random House, New York, 1999

About this Item

A Fine second printing of the first edition in alike dust-jacket. SIGNED by author Peter Matthiessen directly on the title page; Edgar Watson was a boy in post Civil War South Carolina, the son of a brutal drunken father and a helpless mother. The story examines both the familial and the societal roots of Watson's violence, including the system of slavery that cheapened life for everyone it touched. Based on the real life character C. J. Watson, gunned down by a posse of neighbors before WWI. The last installment of The Watson Trilogy, after Killing Mr. Watson and Lost Man's River; 8vo; Signed by Author.

Seller Inventory # 32661

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Bone By Bone
• Publisher: Random House, New York
• Publication Date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375501029
• ISBN 13: 9780375501029
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition; Second Printing.
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Fine
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)
• Seller catalogs:
  • Collection Starter::Hundred Dollars or Less
  • Americana::General
  • Fiction::Historical Fiction
  • By Year Of Issue::1990s

About this title

Synopsis

Peter Matthiessen is one of America's most respected writers and one of the very few National Book Award winners nominated for both fiction and nonfiction. Bone by Bone is arguably his finest novel. Although it stands alone, it is also the capstone of the Watson trilogy, which has been described by the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review as "one of the grand projects of contemporary literature."
        
In the critically acclaimed Killing Mister Watson, Peter Matthiessen brilliantly re-created the life of the legendary E. J. Watson, who was gunned down by a posse of fearful neighbors before World War I. In his masterful sequel, Lost Man's River, Matthiessen returned us to the lawless frontier of the Florida Everglades, where Watson's son Lucius sought to untangle the knot of truth and lies surrounding his notorious father and his strange death. And now, in Bone by Bone, the story unfolds in its final form, in the voice of the enigmatic Mister Watson himself.
    
From his early days as an impoverished child of the Reconstruction era, through the unjust loss of his inherited plantation, to his bloody death in front of his loving wife and children, E. J. Watson was capable of vision and ingenuity, mercy and courage, and sudden, astonishing violence. He was an entrepreneurial sugarcane farmer in the uncharted waterways of the Everglades, an exile in the Indian territories, a devoted father, and, allegedly, the killer of numerous men. He was forced to flee home and family time after time.
    
In Bone by Bone, Peter Matthiessen has accomplished the writer's ultimate challenge: He has laid bare the    humanity at the heart of a dangerous and controversial figure and, in doing so, has added to our understanding of the abiding mystery of human nature.

About the Author

Peter Matthiessen was born in New York City in 1927 and had already begun his writing career by the time he graduated from Yale University in 1950. The following year, he was a founder of The Paris Review.  Besides At Play in the Fields of the Lord, which was nominated for the National Book Award, he has published six other novels, most notably Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man's River (the first and second books of this trilogy), and Far Tortuga. Mr. Matthiessen's parallel career as a naturalist and explorer has resulted in numerous and widely acclaimed books of nonfiction, among them The Tree Where Man Was Born, which was nominated for the National Book Award, and The Snow Leopard, which won it.