Summary
Now a television mini-series airing on National Geographic May 2020!
A Washington Post Best Book of the Year & a New York Times Notable Book
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Shipping News and "Brokeback Mountain," comes the New York Times bestselling epic about the demise of the world's forests: " Barkskins is grand entertainment in the tradition of Dickens and Tolstoy...the crowning achievement of Annie Proulx's distinguished career, but also perhaps the greatest environmental novel ever written" ( San Francisco Chronicle ).
In the late seventeenth century two penniless young Frenchmen, René Sel and Charles Duquet, arrive in New France. Bound to a feudal lord, a " seigneur ," for three years in exchange for land, they become wood-cutters--barkskins. René suffers extraordinary hardship, oppressed by the forest he is charged with clearing. He is forced to marry a Mi'kmaw woman and their descendants live trapped between two inimical cultures. But Duquet, crafty and ruthless, runs away from the seigneur, becomes a fur trader, then sets up a timber business. Proulx tells the stories of the descendants of Sel and Duquet over three hundred years--their travels across North America, to Europe, China, and New Zealand, under stunningly brutal conditions--the revenge of rivals, accidents, pestilence, Indian attacks, and cultural annihilation. Over and over again, they seize what they can of a presumed infinite resource, leaving the modern-day characters face to face with possible ecological collapse.
Proulx's inimitable genius is her creation of characters who are so vivid--in their greed, lust, vengefulness, or their simple compassion and hope--that we follow them with fierce attention. Annie Proulx is one of the most formidable and compelling American writers, and Barkskins is her greatest novel, a magnificent marriage of history and imagination.
Edna Annie Proulx was born in Norwich, Connecticut on August 22, 1935. She graduated from the University of Vermont in 1969 and earned an M. A. from Sir George Williams University in Montreal in 1973. She was a journalist, wrote nonfiction articles for numerous publications, and was the author of several "how-to" books before beginning to write fiction in her 50s.
She became the first woman to win the prestigious PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, for her debut novel Postcards. Her novel The Shipping News won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award in 1994. Accordion Crimes, published in 1996, won the Dos Passos Prize for literature. She also won the O. Henry prize for the year's best short story twice; in 1998 for Brokeback Mountain and in 1999 for The Mud Below. She has written more than 50 articles and stories for periodicals and edited Best American Short Stories of 1997.
(Bowker Author Biography)
