Events

“If America was a melting pot, Butte would be its boiling point.” In 1919, Morrie Morris – last seen making a colorful exit from the one-room schoolhouse in Doig’s long-fictionalized Marias Coulee, Montana, in The Whistling Season - steps off the platform in Butte, a town both figuratlively and literally booming, thanks to the “copper collar” the mining behemoth Anaconda has around its neck. But even on “The Richest Hill on Earth” riches elude Morrie once again, while the complications of a town seething with suspicion seem to seek him out. After a stint as a funeral cryer, he finds a perch in the town library, repository of a surprising literary lode and meeting point for a host of colorful local characters, including another memorable Whistling Season character, Morrie’s erstwhile student Rabrab Rellis. Now a teacher herself, and engaged to a fiery young union leader, Rabrab leads Morrie deeper into the miners’ intrigues, just as he is falling more deeply under the spell of his boarding-house landlady, the aptly named Grace. As tensions above and below ground reach the combustion point, Morrie comes to the rescue of the beleaguered miners in an unexpected and once again distinctively Doig-ishly satisfying way. Author Ivan Doig was born in Montana and grew up along the Rocky Mountain Front, the dramatic landscape that has inspired much of his writing. A former ranch hand, newspaperman, and magazine editor, with a Ph.D. in history to boot, Doig is the author of nine previous novels, most recently The Whistling Season and The Eleventh Man, and three works of nonfiction, including his classic first book, the memoir This House of Sky. He has been a National Book Award finalist and has received the Wallace Stegner Award, a Distinguished Achievement Award from the Western Literature Association, and multiple PNBA Awards, among other honors. He lives in Seattle. Read his guest post at the Village Books Blog by clicking here.