Washington Post books editor John Williams joins us to discuss... John Williams' Butcher's Crossing, orginally published in 1960. The story, set in the 1870s, follows a Harvard dropout as he attempts to find a truer version of himself in the West. We talk about the book's challenge to Emersonian transcendentalism, American rapaciousness, and Western archetypes. (And worry not, we don't play the theme to Star Wars.)

References:
Stoner
William Maxwell
Henry James
Jean-Patrick Manchette
Eve Babitz
Barbara Comyns
Tove Jansson
Natalia Ginzburg
Sylvia Townsend Warner
Albert Bierstadt
Anthony Mann
Budd Boetticher
The Coen brothers
Clint Eastwood
"Nature" by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Fred Schneider
The Confidence-Man by Herman Melville
Kurtz from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
John Ford's The Searchers
John Wayne
Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
"Rip Van Winkle" by Washington Irving
Edward Abbey

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