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Shadow Country: A New Rendering of the Watson Legend

2008 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNERPeter Matthiessen’s great American epic–Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man’s River, and Bone by Bone–was conceived as one vast mysterious novel, but because of its length it was originally broken up into three books. In this bold new rendering, Matthiessen has cut nearly a third of the overall text and collapsed the time frame while deepening the insights and motivations of his characters with brilliant rewriting throughout. InShadow Country,he has marvelously distilled a monumental work, realizing his original vision.Inspired by a near-mythic event of the wild Florida frontier at the turn of the twentieth century, Shadow Country reimagines the legend of the inspired Everglades sugar planter and notorious outlaw E. J. Watson, who drives himself relentlessly toward his own violent end at the hands of neighbors who mostly admired him, in a killing that obsessed his favorite son.Shadow Countrytraverses strange landscapes and frontier hinterlands inhabited by Americans of every provenance and color, including the black and Indian inheritors of the archaic racism that, as Watson’s wife observed, "still casts its shadow over the nation."Peter Matthiessen’s lyrical and illuminating work in the Watson narrative has been praised highly by such contemporaries as Saul Bellow, William Styron, and W. S. Merwin. Joseph Heller said "I read it in great gulps, up each night later than I wanted to be, in my hungry impatience to find out more and more."Praise forShadow Country“Shadow Countryis altogether gripping, shocking, andbrilliantly told, not just a tour de force in its stylistic range, buta great American novel, as powerful a reading experience as nearly any in our literature.This magnificent, sad masterpiece about race, history, and defeated dreams can easily stand comparison with Ralph Ellison'sInvisible Manand Robert Penn Warren's Allthe King's Men. Little wonder, too, that parts of the story of E.J. Watson call up comparisons with Dostoevsky, Conrad, and, inevitably, Faulkner. In every way,Sha

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