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.