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Description edit
An American classic, The Orchard Keeper is the first novel by one of America's finest novelists and author of the critically acclaimed national bestseller All the Pretty Horses. Set in a small, remote community in rural Tennessee, it tells the story of a young boy and the outlaw bootlegger... read more
Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit
Characters/People edit
- Marion Sylder: a whiskey runner
- Kenneth Rattner: murdered by Marion Sylder, Kenneth Rattner is the father of John Wesley Rattner
- Jack the Runner: a bootlegger
- Mr. Eller: a shopkeeper
- Oliver Henderson: a milkman
- John Wesley: John Wesley Rattner, the son of Kenneth Rattner
- Wanita Tipton: romantic interest for John Wesley who, in one scene, removes a leech from her leg.
- Ef Hobie: a bootlegger
- Garland Hobie: a bootlegger, Ef Hobie's son
- Mildred Rattner: John Wesley's mother, a bitter woman.
- Arthur Ownby: "The Old Man" and "Uncle Ather", a hermit.
Quotes edit
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“Evening. The dead sheathed in the earth's crust and turning the slow diurnal of the earth's wheel, at peace with eclipse, asteroid, the dusty novae, their bones brindled with mold and the celled marrow going to frail stone, turning, their fingers laced with roots, at one with Tut and Agamemnon, with the seed and the unborn.”
- Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers
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Lots of times that happens, a body dies and their soul takes up in a cat for a spell. Specially somebody drownded or like that where they don’t get buried proper.
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They are gone now. Fled, banished in death or exile, lost, undone. Over the land sun and wind still move to burn and sway the trees, the grasses. No avatar, no scion, no vestige of that people remains. On the lips of the strange race that now dwells there their names are myth, legend, dust.
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the six-pointed stars of skating waterspiders drifting like bright frail medusas.
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With grass in his mouth the old man sat up and peered about him, heard the rain mendicant-voiced, soft chanting in that dark gramarye that summons the earth to
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On his face a suggestion of joy, of anguish—something primitive and half hidden. The pale eyes burned cold and remote in their hollows like pockets of smoldering gas.
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They moved on across the field, through vapors of fog and wisps of light, to the east, looking like the last survivors of Armageddon.
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He had cut a pole of hickory, hewed it octagonal and graced the upper half with hex-carvings—nosed moons, stars, fish of strange and pleistocene aspect. Struck in the rising light it shone new white as the face of an apple-half.
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About him the tall wheels veered and dished in the erratic parabolas of spun coins unspinning as if not attached to the wagon at all but merely rolling there in that quadratic symmetry by pure chance.
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He sat up, half rose from the cot, would call him back to say That’s not true what I said. It was a damned lie ever word. He’s a rogue and a outlaw hisself and you’re welcome to shoot him, burn him down in his bed, any damn thing, became he’s a traitor to boot and maybe a man steals from greed or murders in anger but he sells his own neighbors out for money and it’s few lie that deep in the pit, that far beyond the pale.
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He lay on his back, his hand over hers, the other hand stiffening. Suddenly he had a bile-sharp foretaste of disaster. Why was that old man shooting holes in the government tank on the mountain?
Highlighted by 3 Kindle customers
First Sentence edit
The tree was down and cut to lengths, the sections spread and jumbled over the grass.
Themes & Symbolism edit
- Vengeance: Describe this theme.
- Bootlegging
- Blood oath: Family loyalty
- reluctant heroes
Authors & Contributors edit
- Cormac McCarthy (Author)
First Edition edit
Original Language: English
Publisher: Random House
Country: United States of America
Publication Date: 1965
ISBN: Add the ISBN.
Page Count: 246
Publisher: Random House
Country: United States of America
Publication Date: 1965
ISBN: Add the ISBN.
Page Count: 246
Classification edit
- Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
- Dewey: 813.54
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