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WINNER OF THE 2005 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION
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.
Gilead is the long-hoped-for second novel by one of our finest writers, a hymn of praise and lamentation to the God-haunted existence that Reverend Ames loves passionately, and from which he will soon part.
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Subjects
award:national_book_critics_circle_award=2004, National Book Critics Circle Award Winner, Reminiscing in old age, award:national_book_critics_circle_award=fiction, Fathers and sons, Fiction, Children of clergy, Grandfathers, Conflict of generations, Clergy, Abolitionists, Large type books, Fiction, christian, general, Iowa, fiction, Clergy, fiction, Fathers and sons, fiction, Fiction, family life, general, Grandparents, fiction, American fiction (fictional works by one author), Open Library Staff Picks, Fiction, family life, Epistolary fiction, Father-son relationship, Christian fiction, Memory, Domestic fiction, Old agePlaces
Kansas, United States, IowaTimes
1950s, Civil War, 20th CenturyShowing 6 featured editions. View all 37 editions?
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Book Details
Edition Notes
Originally published: U.S. : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004.
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First Sentence
"I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said, Why, and I said, Because I'm old, and you said, I don't think you're old."
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