Close Range: Wyoming Stories was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1999. The collection contains eleven stories set in Wyoming, and it is Proulx’s finest achievement in the short form — a body of work in which landscape, labor, and language are fused into something as hard and beautiful as the country it describes.
The stories are populated by ranchers, rodeo riders, hired hands, ranch wives, and solitary men who live in trailers at the end of dirt roads. The landscape is enormous, indifferent, and dangerous: blizzards kill cattle and people with equal impartiality; the distances between ranches are measured in hours of driving; the economy is precarious and getting worse. Proulx’s characters are shaped by this landscape — their emotional range is as compressed as their speech, and the violence that erupts periodically is the violence of people who have no other vocabulary for what they feel.
“Brokeback Mountain” — the story of two cowboys, Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist, who fall in love while herding sheep in the Bighorn Mountains in 1963 and spend the next twenty years in a doomed, intermittent affair — became the most famous American short story published in the last quarter century. Ang Lee’s 2005 film adaptation brought the story to a global audience, but the story itself is more compressed, more brutal, and more devastating than the film: it is told almost entirely in Proulx’s clipped, understated prose, and the emotional impact comes from what is withheld rather than what is expressed.
Other stories in the collection are equally powerful: “The Half-Skinned Steer” follows an elderly man driving back to Wyoming for a funeral through a landscape that is trying to kill him; “The Mud Below” tracks a young bull rider whose body is being systematically destroyed by his sport; “People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water” charts a family’s generations-long cruelty with the flatness of a county record.
Collecting Close Range
First edition (Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1999): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $50–$150
- Very good: $20–$50
- Signed: $100–$300