Gilead : a novel

The Resource Gilead : a novel
Label
Gilead : a novel
Title remainder
a novel
Statement of responsibility
Marilynne Robinson
Creator
Author
Subject
Genre
Language
eng
Summary
In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He "preached men into the Civil War," then, at age fifty, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle. Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father--an ardent pacifist--and his grandfather, whose pistol and bloody shirts, concealed in an army blanket, may be relics from the fight between the abolitionists and those settlers who wanted to vote Kansas into the union as a slave state. And he tells a story of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, which are tested in his tender and strained relationship with his namesake, John Ames Boughton, his best friend's wayward son. This is also the tale of another remarkable vision--not a corporeal vision of God but the vision of life as a wondrously strange creation. It tells how wisdom was forged in Ames's soul during his solitary life, and how history lives through generations, pervasively present even when betrayed and forgotten
Member of
Awards note
Pulitzer Prize, Fiction, 2005.
Cataloging source
DLC
Dewey number
813/.54
Index
no index present
LC call number
PS3568.O3125
LC item number
G55 2004
Literary form
fiction
Series statement
Gilead
Series volume
bk. 1
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