Butcher's Crossing by John Williams

About Butcher's Crossing by John Williams

Butcher's Crossing (1960) by John Williams is his second novel — an anti-Western about Will Andrews, a Harvard graduate who joins a buffalo hunting expedition into a remote Colorado valley in 1873. Williams uses Western conventions to critique frontier romanticism: the hunt is rendered with clinical physical precision that strips away mythology. Belongs alongside McCarthy's Blood Meridian in the tradition of the American literary Western that refuses sentimentality.