Hard Scrabble

Observations on a Patch of Land

John Graves

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781477309353
• eBook ISBN: 9781477309605
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• 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