The Power of the Dog

Optimistically billed as the next Stoner, this 1967 reissue is in fact the better novel…a rich and challenging psychodrama, based on brilliant characterisation… With its echoes of East of Eden and Brokeback Mountain, this satisfyingly complex story deserves another shot at rounding up public admiration * Guardian *[Savage’s] prose is vivid and direct… [his] descriptions of nature have real power… a slow-burn psychological western. * The Times *An exhilarating drama between two brothers set in Twenties Montana, and better even than Stoner * Daily Telegraph *Something aching and lonely and terrible of the west is caught forever on Savage’s pages, and the most compelling and painful of [his] books is The Power of the Dog, a work of literary artThe shocking turn of the book’s final pages keeps the story bright as a blade to the end…This is the perfect example of a book that never quite made it to the rank of classic…but is more than worthy of resurrection now * New Statesman *

Thomas Savage was born on 25 April 1915 in Salt Lake City, Utah, to a large sheep-ranching family. His parents divorced when he was two years old, and on his mother’s remarriage Savage moved with her to Montana. He studied at the University of Montana and worked as a ranch hand for several years, but when an article he wrote on horse-breaking was published in Coronet magazine in 1937, Savage enrolled at Colby College in Maine to study English. He went on to have a variety of jobs, including welder, insurance man and plumber as well as teaching English at Brandeis and Vassar. His first novel, The Pass, was published in 1944 and he went on to write twelve more, including The Power of the Dog. He was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 1980. Thomas Savage died in Virginia on 25 July 2003, aged eighty-eight.

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