Zeke and Ned

by Larry McMurtry, Diana Ossana

Overview

Full of adventure, grace, and tragedy, Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana tell the story of two powerful Cherokee warriors searching for the future of Indian Territory.

Zeke and Ned is the story of Ezekiel Proctor and Ned Christie, the last Cherokee warriors—two proud, passionate men whose remarkable quest to carve a future out of Indian Territory east of the Arkansas River after the Civil War is not only history, but legend. Played out against an American West governed by a brutal brand of frontier justice, this intensely moving saga brims with a rich cast of indomitable and utterly unforgettable characters such as Becca, Zeke's gallant Cherokee wife, and Jewel Sixkiller Proctor, whose love for Ned makes her a tragic heroine.

At once exuberant and poignant, bittersweet and brilliant, Zeke and Ned takes us deep into the hearts of two extraordinary men who were willing to go the distance for the bold vision they shared—and for the women they loved.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780743230179
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	12/03/2002
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	416
Sales rank:	449,884
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Larry McMurtry (1936–2021) was the author of twenty-nine novels, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Lonesome Dove, three memoirs, two collections of essays, and more than thirty screenplays. He lived in Archer City, Texas.

Diana Ossana has written two novels, more than a dozen screenplays and numerous essays.

Hometown:

Archer City, Texas

Date of Birth:

June 3, 1936

Place of Birth:

Wichita Falls, Texas

Education:

B.A., North Texas State University, 1958; M.A., Rice University, 1960. Also studied at Stanford University.

What People are Saying About This

D. Brown

Captain Krall and Gus McCrae of Lonesome Dove must now make room for Zeke Proctor and Ned Christie of the Cherokee Nation. With Diana Ossana, Larry McMurtry has created another cyclorama in words.

From the Publisher

Joyce Maynard Los Angeles Times Book Review Part folk song, part tall tale...wonderful, richly textured storytelling.

Susan Dodd The Washington Post Book World McMurtry and Ossana have conspired to make a novel that is...full [of] power and grace...[and] liable to break your heart.

David Hendricks San Antonio Express-News This team can write. In fact, Zeke and Ned is astonishing...a literary achievement of high order for McMurtry and Ossana.

Editorial Reviews

Joyce Maynard Los Angeles Times Book Review Part folk song, part tall tale...wonderful, richly textured storytelling.

Susan Dodd The Washington Post Book World McMurtry and Ossana have conspired to make a novel that is...full [of] power and grace...[and] liable to break your heart.

David Hendricks San Antonio Express-News This team can write. In fact, Zeke and Ned is astonishing...a literary achievement of high order for McMurtry and Ossana.

From the Publisher

McMurty and Ossana employ a technique they used successfully in Pretty Boy Floyd (LJ 9/1/94), in which a historical character of legendary proportions become the hero of a modern work of fiction. This work focuses on Zeke Proctor and Ned Christic, Cherokee Indians who became folk heroes in the Oklahoma Territory during the 1890s. Unforgiven wrongs that festered since the removal of the Cherokee Nation from Georgia in the 1830s become a moving force in the story of a casual love affair gone awry and the bloody feud and even bloodier legal actions that transpire when federal judges intervene. McMurty paints Zeke's courtship, murder trial, and marriage debacle with broad humor, and Ossana takes the story home with Ned's four-year standoff of armed federal marshals dispatched to take him dead or alive. A wonderfully readable historical novel that furthers the understanding of the Native-white disputes of the last century. Recommended for most collections.
--Thomas L. Kilpatrick, Southern Illinois University Library, Carbondale, Illinois

Library Journal

McMurtry and Ossana have conspired to make a novel that is…full [of] power and grace…[and] liable to break your heart.
—The Washington Post Book World

Susan Dodd

This team can write. In fact, Zeke and Ned is astonishing…a literary achievement of high order for McMurtry and Ossana. May they write many more.
— San Antonio Express-News

David Hendricks

Part folk song, part tall tale…wonderful, richly textured storytelling.
— Los Angeles Times Book Review

Joyce Maynard

Pulitzer Prize winner McMurtry (Dead Man's Walk, 1995, etc.) and his collaborator on Pretty Boy Floyd (1994) attempt to bestow mythic stature on a maverick American Indian in this for-want-of-a- nail yarn set in 1870s Oklahoma.

A half-breed member of the Cherokee Nation, Zeke Proctor is a hard-drinking, happy-go-lucky smallholder. Although married and the father of five, he is surreptitiously bedding the local miller's wife. When her aggrieved husband, a white man, takes revenge by shoveling weevils into Zeke's ground corn, the Civil War vet accidentally shoots and kills his paramour while gunning for the cuckold. Afraid of being hauled before a white judge and swiftly condemned, Zeke takes shelter with his Cherokee son-in-law Ned Christie, claiming the right to be judged by his own people. On the day of his trial in an Indian tribunal, the departed's vindictive brothers precipitate a massacre that leaves 12 more dead. Acquitted in a sham proceeding, Zeke is eventually granted amnesty by President Ulysses S. Grant. By contrast, Ned (unjustly blamed by white officials for the courthouse bloodbath and subsequent murder of a federal marshal) is forced to take to the hills. At the cost of an eye and his young wife's unborn child, he repulses the first posse sent to bring him in. After this violent, embittering brush with the law, the wanted man takes a warrior's vow, refuses to speak English, and digs in for a long siege. Ned holds out for years until a crew of outlaws with badges manages to blast him from his mountain redoubt, albeit not before he becomes an immortal legend among his fatalistic people and in the wider world.

A mock-heroic tale of culture shock and sudden death along our westering frontier in which the principals (whether red or white) are portrayed as simple-minded primitives.

Kirkus Reviews

Tom Stechschulte reads this rompin', stompin' tale in a good-old-boy style and accent, dramatizing the comic and tragic adventures of Zeke Proctor and Ned Christie at the end of the nineteenth century. These Cherokee desperadoes and their wives, Becca and Jewel, are involved in a series of moral and legal conflicts during the Cherokee Nation's struggle for independence. Stechschulte brings the politicians, judges, marshals, bootleggers, and whites of Oklahoma and Arkansas to life, using varying accents, pacing, and speech patterns. He booms at times but is subtle and soft-spoken when necessary and never stumbles over Cherokee words. His interpretation conveys empathy and affection for Zeke and Ned. S.C.A. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine

OCT/NOV 04 - AudioFile