Gunslinger

Fiftieth Anniversary Edition "Gunslinger is a fundamental American masterpiece."---Thomas McGuane This fiftieth anniversary edition commemorates Edward Dorn’s masterpiece, Gunslinger, a comic, anti-epic critique of American capitalism that still resonates today. Set in the American West, the Gunslinger, his talking horse Claude Lévi-Strauss, a saloon madam named Lil, and the narrator called “I” set out in search of the billionaire Howard Hughes. As they travel along the Rio Grande to Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, and finally on to Colorado, they are joined by a whole host of colorful characters: Dr. Jean Flamboyant, Kool Everything, and Taco Desoxin and his partner Tonto Pronto. During their adventures and hijinks, as captured in Dorn’s multilayered, absurd, and postmodern voice, they joke and smoke their way through debates about the meaning of existence. Put simply, Gunslinger is an American classic. In a new foreword Marjorie Perloff discusses Gunslinger's continued relevance to contemporary politics. This new edition also includes a critical essay by Michael Davidson and Charles Olson’s idiosyncratic “Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn,” which he wrote to provide guidance for Dorn's study of, and writing about, the American West.

“[Gunslinger] is altogether a brilliant and strange performance, with no true parallels in American poetry, at least up until then. . . . If it's not the major 20th-century long poem a number of serious critics claim it to be . . . it's the work of a brilliant, wildly original, very funny poet firing on all cylinders.”, “There is nothing else like it in poetry.”, “Gunslinger is perhaps the strangest long poem of the last half-century: a quest myth wrapped around an acid-inspired western comic strip adventure in which a gunslinger, astride a drug-taking, talking horse called Levi-Strauss, searches for Howard Hughes.”, “An essential piece of American literature, already, and the further we descend into an age of circuses without bread, the more poignant will be our Slinger’s aim on the true heart of the West.”, “A dramatic poem of the first order for our day.”

Edward Dorn (1929–1999) was one of the original voices of his generation. Often associated with the Black Mountain poets, Dorn was the author of more than forty books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.