Annie Proulx, That Old Ace in the Hole

Rowland Hughes (University of Hertfordshire)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Sofia Ahlberg (Uppsala University), Patrick Chura (University of Akron), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 2002

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

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That Old Ace in the Hole

(2002) is Annie Proulx’s fourth novel, but, in the wake of its publication, she declared that it would be her last. She would, she stated, write short stories in the foreseeable future (she has published three collections of short fiction so far). Indeed, the short-story form exerts a powerful influence on the shape and tone of this longer work. The novel follows the fortunes of Bob Dollar, a directionless young man from Denver who enters the tightly-knit community of Woolybucket, a small town in the Texas panhandle. He becomes fascinated, and ultimately redeemed, both by its inhabitants and their sense of their own history and connection to the land. In its broad outline, then, the novel has much in common with Proulx’s award-winning

The Shipping News

(1992),…

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1353 words

Citation: Hughes, Rowland. "That Old Ace in the Hole". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 28 August 2008 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=11689, accessed 19 April 2024.]

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