Shadow Country

Shadow Country is a novel by Peter Matthiessen, published by Random House in 2008. Subtitled A New Rendering of the Watson Legend, it is a semi-fictional account of the life of Scottish-American Edgar "Bloody" Watson (1855–1910), a real Florida sugar cane planter and alleged outlaw who was killed by a posse of his neighbors in the remote Ten Thousand Islands region of southwest Florida. Matthiessen revised, condensed, and combined his three previously published novels about Edgar Watson to create this single-volume novel, which is divided into three sections that conform to the three original books. Shadow Country won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2008 and the William Dean Howells Medal in 2010. Contents Shadow Country is a reworked, re-edited, and retitled single-volume version of a trilogy published in the 1990s. The three parts of this book correspond to the three original novels: Killing Mr. Watson (1990), Lost Man's River (1997), and Bone By Bone (1999). Matthiesen's original intention was to produce a single long novel, but his publisher balked at the length of the manuscript and published it as three separate books. Matthiessen was not entirely satisfied with the resulting works and continued to refine his original manuscript off and on for the next several years. The eventual publication of Shadow Country involved substantial editing and culling: while the three separately published books together numbered some 1,300 pages, Shadow Country would number around 900. Most of the cuts came from Lost Man's River.