“Brokeback Mountain” was first published in The New Yorker on October 13, 1997, and collected in Close Range: Wyoming Stories (1999). It was subsequently published as a standalone illustrated edition by Scribner in 2005, coinciding with the release of Ang Lee’s film adaptation.
The story begins in the summer of 1963 when Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist, two young ranch hands, are hired to herd sheep on Brokeback Mountain in the Bighorn range. Alone in the mountains for months, they begin a sexual relationship that surprises them both — neither has the language or the conceptual framework to understand what is happening. They come down from the mountain, marry women, have children, and try to live the lives their world expects of them. But they cannot stay away from each other: for the next twenty years, they meet periodically on fishing trips, and their relationship — passionate, furious, inarticulate — becomes the central fact of both their lives, even as it remains hidden from everyone else.
Proulx’s achievement is in what the story does not say. Ennis and Jack never discuss what they are to each other; they have no vocabulary for it, and the culture of rural Wyoming in the 1960s and 1970s provides none. The story’s emotional devastation operates through omission and implication: a childhood memory of Ennis being shown the mutilated body of a man killed for being gay; a telephone call that conveys Jack’s death in a few flat sentences; the final image of two shirts — one inside the other — hanging in a closet. The shirts are the story’s emotional detonation: Ennis discovers that Jack kept both their shirts from that first summer, nested together, and the image — intimate, domestic, unbearably tender — does what neither man could do in life: it says what they meant to each other.
The 2005 film, directed by Ang Lee and starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, won three Academy Awards and brought the story to an audience of millions. Proulx has spoken about the burden of the story’s fame — particularly the volume of fan fiction that reimagines happy endings for Ennis and Jack, which she considers a misunderstanding of the story’s point.
Collecting Brokeback Mountain
The New Yorker, October 13, 1997: Original magazine publication.
Close Range (Scribner, 1999): First book appearance.
Brokeback Mountain (Scribner, 2005): Standalone illustrated edition.
Market values:
- Close Range first edition, fine/fine: $50–$150
- Standalone 2005 edition, fine/fine: $20–$50
- Original New Yorker issue: $30–$75