The Pass

Best known for his acclaimed novels The Power of the Dog and The Sheep Queen, Thomas Savage (1915-2003) was an extraordinary chronicler of the American West. The Pass, his first novel, was published by Doubleday in 1944, and it sets the stage for several of Savage's later novels which, in the words of Annie Proulx, capture a family complexity of names and identities, of east coast culture and western mountains, of manual labor and writing, of a lost past and private secrets. The Pass tells the compelling story of the founding of a family ranch in the high country along the Montana-Idaho border, where Savage spent his youth. Proulx writes of The Pass, The novel is studded with brilliant protraits that already display Savage's masterly ability to show the inner lives of characters especially women... The language and thinking of the ranch people in The Pass (are) strikingly vivid... A sense of great longing and sympathy for the western landscape colors this novel.