Billy Watson's Croker Sack - by Franklin Burroughs (Paperback)

About the Book

Burroughs reflects on how human and natural histories interconnect, sometimes revealing more than expected. His writing is clear and still as a pond, and his distinctive and evocative voice resonates through the details.

Book Synopsis

In South Carolina, a croker sack is any big cloth sack. When opened, it sometimes reveals more than expected, as do these deceptively simple narratives about fishing trips, flora and fauna, and memories of the past. Observing a snapping turtle, recounting the old age and death of a hunting dog, or talking with neighbors who shot a moose and hung it in their garage, Franklin Burroughs reflects on how human and natural histories interconnect. His writing is clear and still as a pond, and his distinctive and evocative voice resonates through the details.

Review Quotes

[His] essays evoke William Faulkner's South and E. B. White's farm. But Burroughs's style is distinctly his own: always elegant, sometimes simple, plainly honest, and, perhaps most of all, completely authentic. . . . Burroughs is the kind of essayist whose vision transcends time and place. . . . He writes of the stuff of life and does so with a grace and honesty that left me aching for more.

--Fourth Genre

An exquisitely wrought and unerringly graceful book.

--Jim Harrison

Burroughs' writing is eloquent and accomplished, whether he is describing his coastal South Carolina homeland or his adopted home in Maine. Those disparate lands are not so much compared and contrasted as joined by the striking narrative in this book . . . this book is full of delights.

--Hellbender Press

Elegant, unexpected, remarkable for their ability to weave through time and space and turns of emotion, these essays would do Montaigne or Samuel Johnson proud.

--Cleveland Plain Dealer

About the Author

Franklin Burroughs grew up in South Carolina and now lives in Maine, where he teaches at Bowdoin College.