Butcher's Crossing

His Stoner is the book that has garnered the attention, but I prefer this earlier take on the Western genre…it has some gory, visceral passages that are not for the faint-hearted – Kate Atkinson * Irish Times *
Shorn of sentimentality or decoration, the events and places [Williams] describes begin to feel inescapable, permanent, and rivetingly dramatic. This is language that seems to be carved into stone – into mountains… Stoner showed us a writer who had written a great book. To those of us who didn’t know already, Butcher’s Crossing reveals John Williams to be more than that: forgotten writer as he was, he was unquestionably also a great one – Archie Bland * Independent *
Superbly understated – Rosemary Goring * Herald *
One of the finest books about the elusive nature of the West ever written… It’s a graceful and brutal story of isolated men gone haywire * Time Out *
Harsh and relentless yet muted in tone, Butcher’s Crossing paved the way for Cormac McCarthy * New York Times Book Review *
Butcher’s Crossing is like a western by Joseph Conrad…wonderful…beautifully written – David Nicholls
This story about the hunt of one of the last great buffalo herds becomes a young man’s search for the integrity of his own being…The characters are defined, the events lively, the place, the smells, the sounds right. And the prose is superb * Chicago Tribune *
It is the novel’s immense visual power and tangibility of material detail, its fully realized sense of time and place, its telling incidents, its nimble and subtle resonance with the Bible, and its fleshed-out characters, that make it a very great work * Boston Globe *
John Williams’s unsparing novels express a highly qualified though resilient optimism about our ability to salvage something of value from life’s impossible conditions. Along with the necessary isolation of the artist, he conveys the sobering if startled recognition–perhaps with his own career in mind–of the transitory triumph of art * Times Literary Supplement *
Butcher’s Crossing is remarkable for the accuracy of Williams’s prose – John Sutherland * The Times *

John Williams was an author, editor and professor. Born in 1922 in Texas, he served in the United States Army Air Force from 1942 to 1945 in China, Burma and India. His first novel, Nothing But the Night, was published in 1948. After receiving his PhD in 1954, Williams returned to the University of Denver where he first studied to teach literature and creative writing for thirty years. It was during this time that he wrote the novels Butcher’s Crossing (1960) and Stoner (1965). His last novel, Augustus, won the National Book Award in 1973. John Williams died in Arkansas in 1994.