The Power of the Dog: A Novel

Thomas Savage, Annie Proulx

Little, Brown, Jun 1, 2001 - Fiction - 304 pages

"A pitch-perfect evocation of time and place" (Boston Globe) for readers of East of Eden and "Brokeback Mountain." This new edition, with an afterword by Annie Proulx, marks the return of one of the most powerful and distinctive voices in the literature of the American West.

Set in 1920s Montana, this compelling domestic drama tells the story of two brothers -- and of the woman and young boy, mother and son, whose arrival on the brothers' ranch shatters an already tenuous peace. From the novel's startling first paragraph to its very last word, Thomas Savage's voice -- and the intense passion and cruelty of his characters -- holds readers in thrall.

Soon to be a major motion picture starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst, and Paul Dano.

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - St.CroixSue - LibraryThing

Originally published in 1967 and reissued in 2001, this is a powerful and very tense narrative of life in a remote western ranching community where one of the protagonists is a repressed homosexual ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - TimBazzett - LibraryThing

I had never heard of Thomas Savage up until a month or two ago. The Power of the Dog is indeed powerful stuff though. Set in Montana ranching country in the 1920s, it deals with subjects that would ...

About the author

Thomas Savage was born in 1915 in Salt Lake City. His literary career spans five decades & thirteen novels, most notably "The Power of the Dog" (L,B, 1967) & "I Heard My Sister Speak My Name" (L,B, 1977). His most recent novel, "The Corner of Rife & Pacific" (Morrow, 1988), was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award, won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, & was one of "Publisher's Weekly's" fifteen best novels of 1988. He was also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1980.

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.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Power of the Dog: A Novel
• Authors: Thomas Savage, Annie Proulx
• Edition: reprint
• Publisher: Little, Brown, 2001
• ISBN: 0316610895, 9780316610896
• Length: 304 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Family Life / General; Fiction / LGBT / Gay; Fiction / Westerns