Butcher's Crossing

by John Williams

The Good Soldier and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence and Ethan Frome. The Wife of Martin Guerre and The Trial of Sören Qvist

Daisy Miller, The Portrait of a Lady, The Golden Bowl, and The Ambassadors.

Butcher’s Crossing (1960) is a western; Stoner (1965) is an “academic novel,” or rather a novel which unfolds within the walls of the academy; and Augustus (1972)

John Williams’s intense scrutiny of this romantic tale, this unquestioned gloss of the manic energies underlying westward expansion, manifest destiny, the “American spirit” and its projection of an individualism which could only be sought and found in the wild open spaces of the American Frontier.

This came to be a ritual, more and more meaningless as it was repeated, but a ritual which nevertheless gave his life the only shape it now had.

He felt vaguely that he would be leaving something behind, something that might have been precious to him, had he been able to know what it was.