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Woodsburner springs from a little-known event in the life of one of America’s most iconic figures, Henry David Thoreau. On April 30, 1844, a year before he built his cabin on Walden Pond, Thoreau accidentally started a forest fire that destroyed three hundred acres of the Concord woods—an event that altered the landscape of American thought in a single day.
Against the background of Thoreau’s fire, Pipkin's ambitious debut penetrates the mind of the young philosopher while also painting a panorama of the young nation at a formative moment. Pipkin’s Thoreau is a lost soul, plagued by indecision, resigned to a career designing pencils for his father's factory while dreaming of better things. On the day of the fire, his path will intersect with three very different local citizens, each of whom also harbors a secret dream. Oddmund Hus, a lovable Norwegian farmhand, pines for the wife of his brutal employer. Elliott Calvert, a prosperous bookseller, is also a hilariously inept aspiring playwright. And Caleb Dowdy preaches fire and brimstone to his congregation through an opium haze. Each of their lives, like Thoreau's, is changed forever by the fire.
Like Geraldine Brooks's March and Colm Tóibín's The Master, Woodsburner illuminates America’s literary and cultural past with insight, wit, and deep affection for its unforgettable characters, as it brings to vivid life the complex man whose writings have inspired generations.
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I found the book to be dark and dank. The first chapter was promising but then it unravelled into a series of separate stories about people I didn't care about, each told in excruciating detail. The fire was the leading character, the protagonist, the transformative force. Thoreau the only one to just say what he had to say. Around the middle I began counting the pages to the end. This is not to say that it isn't a scholarly attempt to capture the mid 1800s, nor that the language isn't well used, but honestly, I wouldn't recommend it." - Beverlee
Other Reviews
"... his novel succeeds beyond the confines of its literary pedigree, making it a thought-provoking page-turner in its own right, a successful balance of story and character study." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. A fascinating fictional exploration of a seminal American event." - Library Journal
"Starred Review. A superb historical fiction as well as a complex and provocative novel of ideas - Pulitzer Prize material." - Kirkus Reviews
This information about Woodsburner was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Andrew Damon
John Pipkin was born in Baltimore and received his Ph.D. in British Literature from Rice University. His first novel, Woodsburner, was named one of the best books of 2009 by the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, and the San Francisco Chronicle. It won the Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction, the Steven Turner Award for Best Work of First Fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters, and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Pipkin lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and son.
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