Signed First Edition 1974 Hard Cover Book Hard Scrabble by John Graves

Details

Description

Offering a SIGNED First Edition John Graves
Hard Scrabble: Observations on a Patch of Land
Signed by the Author John … Read more Offering a SIGNED First Edition John Graves
Hard Scrabble: Observations on a Patch of Land
Signed by the Author John Graves On front end page.
First Edition
Publisher Alfred A. Knopf New York 1974
Length 267 pages

Hardcover in excellent condition. Yellow cloth with gilt and blue top pages. Dust jacket shows wear from age and use-staining and edge tears.

Graves (August 6, 1920 – July 31, 2013) was an American writer known for his book Goodbye to a River.

"John named it Hard Scrabble when he bought it--400 acres of rough Texas hill country at the far edge of what used to be the old Cotton Kingdom until overcropping, drouth, and hard winds stripped away most of the good dirt. Here Graves brought his family, built a house, raised goats and cattle, struggled with hardwood brush, cultivated some fields, leaving the rest to the dominion of the wild... In this book he makes us feel and understand his gradual commitment to this countryside--how, little by little, he came to feel part of it, came to know its rocky ledges, earth and growing things, its scrub, cedar, and johnsongrass, its wolves, snakes, and wheeling buzzards, its special idiosyncrasies of light and weather. Always there is a sense of its past, "weighted with human remembrance"-- of Indians who long ago camped there, of bootleggers hiding out, of cotton farmers, of logger. There are wonderful stories of local people like old T.J. Mayes, "the fairest of the Laws," and Bill Macauley, who in a fight would "get him a bear hug on a man and then commence to eating"--all of them, like the author himself, living lives inextricably bound to this "patch of land." "Inside me," Graves writes, "there had always been the incipient disease of the land. I had never managed to purge myself of the simple yeoman notion that grass and crops and trees and livestock and wild things and water mattered somehow supremely, that you were not whole unless you had stake in them, a daily knowledge of them." This knowledge he now shares. Profoundly knowing, set forth in a prose as sinewy as the tough cedar standing on Somervell County hillsides, his new book--like his wonderful Goodbye to a River--seems certain to become a classic"--Publisher.

A Note About the author

John Alexander Graves III was born in Fort Worth, Texas on August 6, 1920. He attended what is now Rice University. In 1942, he joined the Marine Corps and served in the Pacific. He was wounded by a Japanese grenade in Saipan, which left him blind in one eye. He taught English at the University of Texas at Austin for three years. He received a master's degree in English at Columbia University. He wrote numerous books during his lifetime including Goodbye to a River, Hard Scrabble, and From a Limestone Ledge. He died on July 31, 2013 at the age of 92. See less