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In this poignant memoir, poet-novelist Freya Manfred recounts the
artistic life and death of her father, the prolific and highly
regarded author Frederick Manfred. Using family letters and
passages from her father's novels as well as her own memoirs, she
explores their powerful personal and literary relationship, which
spanned nearly five decades. Freya manfred described what it meant
to be the daughter of a strong-willed man who was dedicated,
sometimes at great cost, to a creative life. Her story starts with
the tender power and beauty of his funeral in 1994, then moves back
to a clear-eyed and often humorous depiction of their home life,
which was shaped by her father's insistence on the quiet and
solitude necessary for his writing. She remembers the shift in
their relationship as her literary career blossomed and he added
the roles of mentor and friend. Finally, she shares frank and
loving detail of her family's struggle to help her father die well.
Frederick Manfred was the author of Lord Grizzly, finalist for the
National Book Award, as well as twenty-six other novels and short
story collections, many of which explore nuanced struggles with
death and other life challenges which demand toughness and
resilience. Although a work of fiction, Boy Almighty conveys
Manfred's dramatic personal story of contracting tuberculosis as a
young man and being cared for at a convalescent home at the Glen
Lake Sanatorium in Minnesota. A remarkable blend of
stream-of-consciousness and objective reporting, Boy Almighty is
the story of a man in the throes of dissolution and disintegration
from tuberculosis and of his recovery, reintegration, and rebirth.
Eric Frey, sensitive, aware, in love with life, yet beset with
frustration and failure, is at first too ill to be placed in a
tubercular ward, where his almost certain death would be upsetting
to the other patients. Running concurrently with the inner story of
Frey's mind is the story of his body's struggle to survive. Boy
Almighty is a profound and compelling study of a man who
desperately wants to live and of his relationships with doctors,
nurses, roommates, and a fellow patient who teaches him the meaning
of love.
Hunter, trapper, resourceful fighter, and scout, Hugh Glass was
just a rugged man among other rugged American frontiersmen until he
was mauled by a grizzly bear and left for dead by his best friends.
Hugh's rage drove him to crawl two hundred miles across dangerous
territory to seek revenge until he was no longer Hugh Glass but had
become Lord Grizzly. "Lord Grizzly" is the second volume of
Frederick Manfred's acclaimed five-volume series, The Buckskin Man
Tales. For this Bison Books edition, poet Freya Manfred provides a
new introduction.
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