Clear Title: A Novel (Drumlummon Montana Literary Masters Series) - Softcover

Coates, Grace Stone

9780976968467: Clear Title: A Novel (Drumlummon Montana Literary Masters Series)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0976968460 ISBN 13: 9780976968467

Publisher: Drumlummon Institute, 2014

In 1931, Alfred A. Knopf published Grace Stone Coates’ first novel, Black Cherries, made up of a series of linked stories. In her introduction to the 2003 reprint of Black Cherries, Mary Clearman Blew wrote that Coates wasn’t entirely satisfied with the novel, noting that perhaps “a more coherent book would have been a more revealing book.” Clear Title, written soon after the publication of Black Cherries, may be that more coherent book—it certainly tells a more revealing story. Just as Black Cherries reveals, in Blew’s words, a “family caught in a web of tension so acute that it binds them inexorably even as it separates them,” Clear Title tells the story of the same family, but more directly, revealing the secrets, lies, and betrayals that created that painful web. In her introduction to Clear Title, Caroline Patterson—editor of the award-winning anthology, Montana Women Writers: A Geography of the Heart—writes, “Clear Title is a frank exploration of power in marriage: the moral, sexual, intellectual, and legal power between a husband and a wife. . . . By the end of the book, the power in the family has shifted. . . . Instead of a father ruling the roost, we see three sisters, traveling as equals, released . . . from the rigidity and anger of the past.” Drumlummon Institute now makes this powerful, heartbreaking novel available to readers already passionate about Coates’ writing and life. Clear Title is Grace Stone Coates’ last remaining major work still unpublished.

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About the Author:

Poet, fiction writer, and editor Grace Stone Coates (1881−1976) spent most of her adult life in the ranching community of Martinsdale, Montana. During her lifetime, she published—to critical acclaim—two collections of poems, Mead and Mangel-Wurzel (Caxton, 1931), and Portulacas in the Wheat (Caxton, 1932), and a series of linked stories, Black Cherries (Knopf, 1931). Twenty of her short stories were cited in Best American Short Stories, and she was among the most widely published American poets west of the Mississippi prior to World War II. She edited several books for The Caxton Printers of Caldwell, Idaho, including Riding the High Country (1933) by Patrick Tucker, and she served as assistant editor for the influential regional literary journal, The Frontier (later Frontier and Midland) of The University of Montana, where she worked closely with legendary editor Harold G. Merriam.

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