Shadow Country

Shadow Country is a novel by Peter Matthiessen set on the wild frontier of southwest Florida around the turn of the twentieth century. It reimagines the life and violent death of E. J. Watson, a real Everglades sugar planter who was admired as an energetic pioneer and feared as a ruthless outlaw. In 1910 Watson was gunned down by a group of his own neighbors, and the novel moves backward and forward from that event to ask how a man so respected could come to such an end. Told through the voices of the people who knew him, through the investigations of his favorite son, and finally through Watson's own account, the book examines family, frontier violence, race and the myths a community builds around a single man. Matthiessen reworked and condensed his earlier trilogy about Watson into this single volume. It won the 2008 National Book Award for Fiction.