Shadow Country

Summary

A monumental retelling of the life and violent death of E. J. Watson, a sugar-cane planter and feared outlaw in the lawless Florida Everglades at the turn of the twentieth century. Told in three parts and through many voices, the book reckons with frontier violence, racial hierarchy, and the making of American myth. Matthiessen revised and condensed his earlier trilogy into a single, definitive work that reads as both saga and inquest.