Omensetter'S Luck A Novel

Brackett Omensetter arrives, with his wife, family and belongings in the rural American town of Gilean. It swiftly becomes apparent that he is someone out of the ordinary, as he sets off a ground swell of violent emotions in the once tranquil commmunity. Who is he? What does he represent?



"The most important work of fiction by an American in this literary generation." -The New Republic

Now celebrating the 50th anniversary of its publication, Omensetter's Luck is the masterful first novel by the author of The Tunnel, Middle C, On Being Blue, and Eyes: Novellas and Stories.

Greeted as a masterpiece when it was first published in 1966, Omensetter's Luck is the quirky, impressionistic, and breathtakingly original story of an ordinary community galvanized by the presence of an extraordinary man. Set in a small Ohio town in the 1890s, it chronicles - through the voices of various participants and observers - the confrontation between Brackett Omensetter, a man of preternatural goodness, and the Reverend Jethro Furber, a preacher crazed with a propensity for violent thoughts. Omensetter's Luck meticulously brings to life a specific time and place as it illuminates timeless questions about life, love, good, and evil. This edition includes an afterword written by William Gass in 1997.

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