The Dying Grass: A Novel of the Nez Perce War

From the National Book Award-winning author of Europe Central - a dazzling fictional account of the epic fighting retreat of the Nez Perce Indians

In this fifth installment in his acclaimed Seven Dreams series of novels examining the collisions between Native Americans and European colonizers, William T. Vollmann tells the story of the epic fighting retreat of the Nez Perce Indians, with flashbacks to the Civil War.

Defrauded and intimidated at every turn, the Nez Perces finally went on the warpath in 1877, subjecting the U.S. Army to its greatest defeat since Little Big Horn the previous year, as they fled from northeast Oregon across Montana to the Canadian border. Vollmann's main character is not the legendary Chief Joseph but his pursuer, General Oliver Otis Howard, the brave, shy, tormented, devoutly Christian Civil War veteran. In this novel, we see him as commander, father, son, husband, friend, and killer.

Teeming with many vivid characters on both sides of the conflict, and written in an original style in which the printed page works as a stage with multiple layers of foreground and background, The Dying Grass is another mesmerizing achievement from one of the most ambitious writers of our time.

Author: William T. Vollmann
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 07/26/2016
Pages: 1376
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 2.60lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.00w x 2.20d
ISBN13: 9780143109402
ISBN10: 0143109405
BISAC Categories:
- Fiction | Historical | General
- Fiction | Literary
- Fiction | Indigenous

About the Author
William T. Vollmann is the author of ten novels, including Europe Central, which won the National Book Award. He has also written four collections of stories, including The Atlas, which won the PEN Center USA West Award for Fiction, a memoir, and six works of nonfiction, including Rising Up and Rising Down and Imperial, both of which were finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers Award and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His journalism and fiction have been published in The New Yorker, Harpers, Esquire, Granta, and many other publications.