Mountain Time

by Bernard DeVoto

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Genres: Fiction

Paperback

First published January 1, 1947

About the author

Bernard Augustine DeVoto was an American historian and author who specialized in the history of the American West.

Reviews

[Alex Smith · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had known Bernard DeVoto only as an award-winning historian and Mark Twain scholar, so I was curious to see how he fared as a novelist. If this book is any example, DeVoto should have stuck to scholarship. "Mountain Time" seems very much in the vein of Cozzens' "By Love Possessed" - a wearisome soap opera with pretensions to intellectual and artistic merit. A fair number of stereotypical characters from the genre appear: the brilliant but troubled hero at odds with the society around him, the mentor figure with feet of clay, the hard-boiled but good-hearted waitress, the supportive, motherly older woman with seemingly no life of her own (here she's a hospital administrator; in other such fiction she could appear as the loyal secretary or the priest's devoted housekeeper), and the shallow aspiring artist who uses his supposed aesthetic superiority as an excuse for parasitic selfishness. The hero and heroine's tempestuous, tedious love-hate relationship is dragged out to numbing length, with such clunking dialogue as "You're rotten with the disease of greatness," "I knew life was decent just because it had you in it," "We won't be free of each other until we die," and (I'm not making this up) "Oh, kiss me, you big fool."

[D · Rating 5 out of 5]

I rediscovered this book in my library, a first edition, and knowing a little about Bernard DeVoto, set down and rediscovered him and to my great satisfaction I am more than pleased I did. DeVoto's "Mountain Time" is so well written that it goes beyond what I am able to describe. His use of words, phrases, and reflections are indefinable.

[Ramona · Rating 2 out of 5]

I usually don't read books I don't enjoy. This is the first time I have read an older publication that I truly did not enjoy. The writing, couldn't get into the swing of it's rhythm, the characters were not interesting to me.

[John · Rating 1 out of 5]

Every ten pages, I would tell myself to stop but I kept on going and going and going, It was a terrible book, so fake, so boring, so poorly written in my opinion. I can not think of anyone liking this book, at first I thought a medical student might if they were stupid. but if they are in medical school, they should not be stupid but what do I know.

[Judy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't finish this book so my rating probably isn't fair. I found the chapters I did read to be tedious, sarcastic, and cynical. The plot didn't catch my attention. What a disappointment!