Bad Land

Jonathan Raban, in his award winning novel, Bad Land, attempts to describe the migration of homesteaders to eastern Montana in the first decade of this century, and examines the last great wave of American western settlement. More tellingly, Bad Land is somewhat of a memoir; a well edited collection of stories and events that took place during Raban’s experiences in the Great American West. His novel is an attempt to redefine a travel book, …

…calculations in the same distraught writing; seen the numbers gang up on me and breed. What the bottom line always says is the old 2 a.m. cry, We can't go on living like this”(page 11). Listing the ledger's grim figures would have been dry history in another writer's hands, but Raban brings the moment home. In Jonathan Raban’s Bad Land, he uses interviews and good old-fashioned footwork to uncover the story of westward expansion.