Hard Scrabble: Observations on a Patch of Land

"A kind of homemade book--imperfect like a handmade thing, a prize. It's a galloping, spontaneous book, on occasion within whooping distance of that greatest and sweetest of country books, Ivan Turgenev's A Sportsman's Notebook."--Edward Hoagland, New York Times Book Review"His subjects are trees and brush, hired help, fences, soil, armadillos and other wildlife, flood and drought, local history, sheep and goats . . . and they come to us reshaped and reenlivened by his agreeably individual (and sometimes cranky) notions."--New Yorker"If Goodbye to a River was in some sense Graves's Odyssey, this book is his [version of Hesiod's] Works and Days. It is partly a book about work, partly a book about nature, but mostly a book about belonging. In the end John Graves has learned to belong to his patch of land so thoroughly that at moments he can sense in himself a unity with medieval peasants and Sumerian farmers, working with their fields by the Tigris."--Larry McMurtry, Washington Post Book World"Hard Scrabble is hard pastoral of the kind we have learned to recognize in Wordsworth, Frost, Hemingway, and Faulkner. It celebrates life in accommodation with a piece of the 'given' creation, a recalcitrant four hundred or so acres of Texas cedar brake, old field, and creek bottom, which will require of any genuine resident all the character he can muster."--Southwest Review

Author: John Graves
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 02/09/2016
Pages: 288
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.81lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 0.65d
ISBN: 9781477309353

About the Author
JOHN GRAVES(1920-2013)A meticulous observer of the natural world and an equally precise crafter of the written word, John Graves is renowned for his Brazos Trilogy--Goodbye to a River, Hard Scrabble, and From a Limestone Ledge. He is widely acknowledged as Texas's most beloved writer.