"Hard Scrabble is hard pastoral of the kind we have learned to
recognize in Wordsworth, Frost, Hemingway, and Faulkner. It
celebrates life in accommodation with a piece of the 'given'
creation, a recalcitrant four hundred or so acres of Texas cedar
brake, old field, and creek bottom which will require of any
genuine resident all the character he can muster."—Southwest
Review
	
     "A rumination tinctured with Graves's love of history, his
inquisitiveness about his neighbors, and his shrewd knowledge of
the natural world."—Atlantic Monthly

  "His subjects are trees and brush, hired help, fences, soil,
armadillos and other wildlife, flood and drought, local history,
sheep and goats . . . and they come to us reshaped and reenlivened
by his agreeably individual (and sometimes cranky)
notions."—The New Yorker

   Originally published by Knopf in 1974, Hard Scrabble has never
been out of print.

_________________________________________________________

JOHN GRAVES grew up in Fort Worth, graduated from Rice
University, and received his M.A. in English from Columbia
University. During World War II as a marine, he saw action in the
Pacific and was wounded at Saipan. He taught briefly at the
University of Texas in Austin, leaving to become a freelance
writer, traveling to exotic places—Majorca and Tenerife, Spain;
New York City; and New Mexico.

   In the late 1950s Graves returned to Texas, taught for a time at
Texas Christian University, and purchased Hard Scrabble, the four
hundred acres in Somervell County near Glen Rose where he has
worked both as a farmer and a writer ever since. His stories and
articles have appeared in such venues as The New Yorker, Town
and Country, The Atlantic, Holiday, American Heritage, and
Esquire.

   His best known work, Goodbye to a River, a personal and
historical book based on an autumn canoe trip down a part of the
Brazos about to be radically altered, was published by Knopf in
1960 and has been in print ever since. In 1980 Knopf brought out
From a Limestone Ledge (now available from SMU Press), a
collection of personal essays. In 2000, John Graves and the Making
of Goodbye to a River: Selected Letters, 1957-60 (now available
from SMU Press) came out to commemorate the fortieth
anniversary of the publication of Goodbye to a River.  Graves is 
a past president, senior member, and fellow of the Texas
Institute of Letters, which honored him with the Carr P. Collins
Award for both Goodbye to a River and Hard Scrabble.