Snakehunter - Softcover

A language feast, sweet and sad as the West Virginia landscape it describes. Ahead of its time when first published, this important novel now at last has a chance to find its true audience."" - Ed McClanahan, author of The Natural Man ""A beautifully achieved novel, wrought in a prose warmed and contoured with kind of a sculptor's touch, evoked in crystal-bright incidents which bend neither to sentiment nor easy bitterness."" - Scott Turow, San Francisco Chronicle ""An excellent novel about a West Virginia childhood. Kinder has, to begin with, a good sense of his region: he has rested his story on the firmest possible bases, namely character and place. His dialogue, particularly that of his female characters, is first rate. One would like to secure for this excellently crafted book all the readers one can."" - Larry McMurtry, The Washington Post

First published in 1973, this debut novel is the deeply moving coming-of-age story of Speer Whitfield, whose recollection of his upbringing and his large, remarkable, and often peculiar family evokes the forces that set the path for a boy's growth into manhood in 1940s Appalachia.