Here Lies Hugh Glass

Jon T. Coleman is a professor of American history at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of "Vicious: Wolves and Men in America," which won the W. Turrentine Jackson Prize and the John H. Dunning Prize.

"[A] vigorously written meditation on 19th-century America's encounter with the wilderness." --Michael J. Ybarra, "The Wall Street Journal ""Richly told . . . [Coleman] masterfully mines what scant life poor Glass left behind (one letter to the parents of a companion killed by the Arikara Indians) to argue convincingly that the bear attack story is one of the contributing factors in how Americans have come to think of themselves." --Stephen J. Lyons, "Minneapolis Star Tribune ""[Coleman's] writing is certainly audacious, not just in his colorful language . . . but also in his willingness to discard traditional disciplinary boundaries and in his exuberant mixing of history, folklore, literature, popular culture, and the natural sciences." --Nathan E. Bender, "Library Journal" "[Coleman] shines a pure light on the actual conditions of the working man in the American West, on the fundamental relation between men, animals, and Native Americans, and on the many rascals and scamps, not to mention confidence men and counterfeiters, who are the real source of our greatest national myths." --Gaylord Dold, "The Wichita Eagle ""In this harrowing and beautifully written book, Jon T. Coleman shows us how backwoods workers experienced a West that left them scarred and mutilated. These are the raw (and bloody) materials for America's tall tales, epic boasts, dime novels, and Wild West medicine shows." --Scott Nelson, Legum Professor of History, College of William & Mary "Almost killed by a grizzly, almost erased by the passage of time, Hugh Glass is resurrected by Jon T. Coleman in this wise and witty book. The American encounter with the dangers of the natural world will never look quite the same again." --Karl Jacoby, Professor of History, Brown University "Jon T. Coleman steers the horrendous story of Hugh Glass through the frontier writer James Hall, Herman Melville's ubiquitous Confidence Man, modern-day survivalism, advertisements