The Bitter Roots
by Norman Macleod
in collaboration with: Boiler House Press
published by University of Montana Press
When fourteen-year-old Pauly Craig takes a swim in the Clark Fork River one summer day, he doesn't expect to see a boy drown. Surrounded by everyday violence in his Montana town, Pauly is determined to prove himself, navigating the awkward fumbles of boyhood against a backdrop of strikes, gang fights, trainhopping, bootlegging, and the casualties of war.
First published in 1941 and never before reissued, The Bitter Roots is a largely autobiographical novel full of evocative details of a time and place, the work of a writer coming to terms with his past. It's a frank, unvarnished portrait of America from its entry into World War One to the start of Prohibition. Norman Macleod shows us a country struggling with racism, class prejudice, conflicts between labor and capital, and sexual stereotypes. A vivid coming-of-age story, The Bitter Roots reminds us that finding and holding on to your identity is one of the greatest battles there is.
330 pages, 7.8 x 5.1 inches, appendix
softcover
ISBN 10: 1-915812-38-0
ISBN 13: 9781915812384
$24.99
RELEASE DATE
September 2024
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| Norman Macleod was born in Salem, Oregon, in 1906 and lived in Missoula, Montana, from 1913 to 1924. He earned degrees from the University of New Mexico and Columbia University. He taught at institutions including San Francisco State College, the University of Baghdad in Iraq, and Pembroke State University. He died in 1985. | |
| Joanna Pocock is an Irish-Canadian writer currently living in London. Her first book, Surrender, won the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize in 2018 and was published in 2019. Her hybrid memoir-roadtrip, Greyhound, is coming in spring 2025. Her writing has appeared in The Nation, The Spectator, and elsewhere. She teaches at the University of the Arts, London. | |
| Gabriella Graceffo is Managing Editor of Poetry Northwest and a graduate student at the University of Montana pursuing a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies, building on her MFA in Poetry and MA in Literature there. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Poets & Writers, Pleiades, Gulf Coast, Hippocampus, and others. |
''Passages of genuine poetry, but above all, he has succeeded in capturing the life of that period, in retaining the feel of it so that any reader can see the time as it was.''
— Louis L'Armour