Join UTK professor Ernest Freeberg and "Zoom in" to discuss this classic western, BUTCHER'S CROSSING by John Williams. The event takes place on Wednesday May 27th @ 6pm on Zoom as Union Ave Books and University of Tennessee Humanities Center continue a new Public Books Masterclass series.
Step 1 - Purchase a Book: We encourage you to purchase a book to attend, but it is not required. Union Ave Books is offering curbside and home delivery of books, as well as $3.00 shipping at this time. You can order online at www.unionavebooks.com (book link at the bottom of THIS page), or call the store at 865-951-2180.
Step 2 - RSVP: RSVP for the online masterclass discussion at RSVP@unionavebooks.com and you will be sent a link to the Zoom discussion. Please note, attendance is limited to the first 250 people who log in to the Zoom link. The hosts cannot provide technical assistance for the online event and will not provide book refunds if the broadcast experiences technical difficulties.
About the Presenter
Ernest Freeberg is head of the UT History Department and a UT Distinguished Professor. His teaching and research interests center on the cultural and intellectual history of the United States in the 19th and early 20th century. He is the author of The Education of Laura Bridgman, which won the American Historical Association’s Dunning Prize; Democracy’s Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, The Great War, and the Right to Dissent; The Age of Edison; and the forthcoming A Traitor to His Species: Henry Bergh and the Birth of the Animal Rights Movement.
About the Book
In his National Book Award–winning novel Augustus, John Williams uncovered the secrets of ancient Rome. With Butcher’s Crossing, his fiercely intelligent, beautifully written western, Williams dismantles the myths of modern America.
It is the 1870s, and Will Andrews, fired up by Emerson to seek “an original relation to nature,” drops out of Harvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher’s Crossing, a small Kansas town on the outskirts of nowhere. Butcher’s Crossing is full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. Before long Andrews strikes up a friendship with one of them, a man who regales Andrews with tales of immense herds of buffalo, ready for the taking, hidden away in a beautiful valley deep in the Colorado Rockies. He convinces Andrews to join in an expedition to track the animals down. The journey out is grueling, but at the end is a place of paradisal richness. Once there, however, the three men abandon themselves to an orgy of slaughter, so caught up in killing buffalo that they lose all sense of time. Winter soon overtakes them: they are snowed in. Next spring, half-insane with cabin fever, cold, and hunger, they stagger back to Butcher’s Crossing to find a world as irremediably changed as they have been.
About the Author
John Williams (1922—1994) was born in Texas. He taught for many years at the University of Denver, where he was head of the creative writing program. Williams won the 1973 National Book Award in fiction for Augustus. His novel Stoner is also published as an NYRB Classic.
