Hard Scrabble

Observations on a Patch of Land

John Graves

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781477309605
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

The two-time National Book Award finalist and author of Goodbye to a River ruminates over what an "unmagnificent" Texas homestead has meant to him. "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, The 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." — The 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, The 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

Table of contents

• Cover
• Also by John Graves
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Grant Acknowledgement
• Contents
• 1. By Way of Introduction
• 2. A Comment
• 3. Used to Be
• 4. The Forging of a Squireen
• 5. Of the Lay of Things, and a Creek
• 6. Ghosts
• 7. A Rooted Population
• 8. An Irrelevance
• 9. Hoof and Paw, Tooth and Claw, Little Creatures Everywhere
• 10. His Chapter
• 11. Helpers
• 12. 2 × 4
• 13. Another Irrelevance
• 14. The War with Mother N.
• 15. Interlude
• 16. The War Resumed
• 17. What Happened to Mother N.’s Own Boy?
• 18. Reality as Viewed Darkly Through Old Snujf-Bottle Shards
• Afterword by the Author (2002)
• A Note About the Author