Snowdrift: A Story of the Land of the Strong Cold

James Beardsley HendryxProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.0
Word count
500K words
Chapters
50

Tags

English Originals Nature's PowerWilderness SurvivalAdventure JourneyFate and FortuneRugged SpiritSnowfield AdventureFrozen North

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Snowdrift: A Story of the Land of the Strong Cold by James B. HendryxAuthor: Hendryx, James B. (James Beardsley), 1880-1963,Language: English, Class: PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature, Release Date: Oct 21, 2011

Editor's review

Hendryx's Snowdrift is a North American narrative set in a land of extreme cold, catalogued under American and Canadian literature and circulated as a public-domain ebook through Project Gutenberg. Its appeal comes chiefly from the setting itself: bitter cold, snowfields, and frontier life generate the narrative pressure, and the characters' choices unfold under the compulsion of natural conditions, giving the book a strong regional flavor and the momentum of genre fiction. As a specimen of early North American popular literature, it also shows how writers of the period depicted the northern frontier and turned survival experience into narrative drive. It suits English-language leisure reading, or as a supplementary text for those exploring North American frontier literature; but readers should not expect deep analysis of regional society—better to take it as a story than as historical source material.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Read the first two chapters to get a feel for the environmental description and narrative pace, then decide whether to read the whole book.
  2. While reading, note how natural scenery drives the characters' decisions, and jot down relevant passages.
  3. After finishing, find an overview of North American frontier literature to compare against and understand the book's place in the genre.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
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  11. 11
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  13. 13
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  26. 26
  27. 27
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  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
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  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48
  49. 49
  50. 50

FAQ

What kind of book is this? The metadata classifies it under American and Canadian literature; judging by the title and subject, it is a narrative work set in an extreme-cold frontier, with the flavor of popular fiction rather than a documentary or academic work. Enter it as a story, and don't measure it by the standards of historical scholarship.
Is the original English difficult to read? As early twentieth-century North American popular fiction, the language is generally straightforward, though it contains older expressions and regional usages. Intermediate and advanced English readers can usually read it smoothly with a dictionary; beginners may struggle with vocabulary and sentence patterns, so it is best to sample a chapter first.
Is it suitable for learning about northern North American history? Not as a historical source. It is a literary work, and its depiction of the environment serves plot and atmosphere; it may not accurately reflect specific historical facts or social conditions. If you are interested in frontier history, look for historical works and treat this book as a supplement of atmosphere and imagination.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

James Beardsley Hendryx Author · American · 1880–1963

James Beardsley Hendryx (1880–1963) was an American author born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota. He worked in a variety of occupations before turning to fiction, and over his lifetime wrote more than forty novels as well as numerous short stories. His fiction is mostly set in the northern wilderness of Canada, Alaska, and Montana, and deals with logging camps, the fur trade, gold prospecting, and harsh natural conditions. His style leans toward Western adventure and frontier tales, with plots centered on survival and human testing in the wild. His representative works include The Texan, The Challenge of the North, and Snowdrift, along with the Connie Morgan juvenile series and the Halfaday Creek series. Because public information is limited, further details of his life and literary career remain to be verified.