The Legend of Colton H. Bryant - Brossura

'Alexandra Fuller's wonderful biography The Legend of Colton H Bryant tells how Colton started work as a drill on a rig, despite his young wife begging him to quit - but all the big heart in the world can't save him from the new unkind greed that has possessed Wyoming during this latest mineral boom.
A poignant tribute to one of the world's good people'
Belfast Telegraph 24/5
‘The Legend of Colton H Bryant...is a very vivid, fast, beautifully written novel clearly in a great American tradition of Western writing, except first of all that it’s author, Alexandra Fuller is British-born and brought up in Africa and second, it’s not a novel at all... I read through it and thought “A fantastic, gripping piece of fiction, this” but it’s not... It’s been rightly said that anyone who’s seen films like There Will Be Blood or No Country for Old Men will feel there’s a certain cinematic atmosphere’
Start the Week, Andrew Marr 02/06

‘I found this book in some ways hard to read, because I had a lump in my throat almost the entire way through. It is very effectively written and it reminds me, in terms of the polemic, of Mark Twain and Huckleberry Finn, which is a polemic against slavery but it doesn’t ever say that up front: it tells the story of someone with whom you feel such intense sympathy’
Start the Week, Phillip Bobbit, author of Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century 02/06

‘It’s an absolutely wonderful book and it reinforces my view that societies are often best observed by outsiders, because they can see them whole, they can see them with a fresh eye’
Start the Week, Michael Frayn 02/06
"Her latest book - set in her new home, the high plains of Wyoming - hangs so faultlessly on its high-altitude, big-sky, oil-drilling bones that it seems not so much to have been written as uncovered by the wind and weather of the American north-west...like all westerns, this story is a tragedy before it even starts because there is no way a man like Colton can win against all the odds out there. Wyoming may be one of those places where the good die young. But in bringing Colton Bryant back to life on the page, Ms Fuller has had her own revenge'
The Economist 21/5
"The life story of this soulful, blue-eyed boy with a gentle heart inspired this moving, poignant tale that explores big themes such as hardship, friendship, prejudice and the sad lot of the mistfit. If you fancy a change from your usual holiday reads, this will lend some much-needed colour'
Lead review, Glamour Magazine July issue
‘I wish people would take more notice of...everything, to be more aware of everything around them, or at least everything they consume, from fuel to plastic bags to love’
Independent 10/6

‘All the characters here silently and gracefully accept the fight they have on their hands which is a fight against their own, much-loved surroundings, against that land that ‘grew’ them... This modern Western is a true story. “This is a work of non-fiction, but I have taken narrative liberties with the text”, Fuller tells us. Some of the dialogue is re-created from real life, and only one of the characters’ names is changed. But the Legend of Colton H. Bryant must be read as fiction. The pain of this story – and especially of its beautifully executed ending – is best told as a traditional Western, where it and its landscape can be given some sort of reassuring order... The West is at once real and mythical here, it nurtured the cowboy and the Western, the oil rigs and Colton, a memorable character who would have been unknown, and in the end forgotten were it not for this telling of his legend’
TLS 13/6

‘With the force of an emotional novel, this dramatised biography is a polemic against the energy industry’s spoliation of the high plains of Wyoming and the dangerous exploitation of the men who drill there for oil and gas. The book is a panegyric to an austerely beautiful land and a lament for the pioneer cowboys’ descendants, now economically compelled to risk their lives as roughnecks on the oil rigs... Having got to know Colton so well in this colourfully written case history, the reader will deplore any industrial attempt to dismiss him as a mere statistic’
The Spectator 7/6

‘Alexandra Fuller first heard of Colton H Bryant when she was researching an article on the energy boom. Bryant paid dearly for his involvement in the oil business, slipping to his death of a Wyoming rig, aged 25 in 2006. His employers, Patterson-UTI, were less heavily penalised – fined just $7000 for the six safety breaches that resulted in his death. A seething postscript notes that their income in the same quarter topped $598m.’
Sunday Times 15/6

‘The Legend of Colton H Bryant is a love-song to the state of Wyoming. Part biography, part elegy, it tells the real-life story of Colton Bryant, an ordinary “rough-broke” Wyoming boy, remarkable for being unremarkable... She’s wonderful on the details of life outdoors- the way, for example, the flames of a newly made fire “search around for a grip on the wood”. Eschewing a conventional non-fiction voice, she lets her narrative roll and twang with the rhythms and slang of a High Plains native’
FT 14/6
‘She makes us feel as if at first hand the fragility of bodies pitched against Wyoming’s fearful winters and the hellish drills and derricks of the oil fields’
Evening Standard 16/6
‘The New Yorker commissioned her to write an article on the rise of methamphetamine abuse in Wyoming. "So I went to a town which had experienced a 200 to 300 per cent increase in methamphetamine abuse. There are only two people you need to see to find out what's going on in a town like that: the vicar and the sheriff. I went to the sheriff and the first thing out of his mouth was, 'It's got nothing to do with the oil patch'." In the 18 months Fuller then spent investigating the social costs of the boom in domestic drilling, she also became enraged at the environmental destruction it caused. "It was one of the few truly wild wildernesses left. Rolling hills of fragrant sage. The destruction is equivalent to somebody ploughing up every last clump of heather in Scotland, turning every small village into a man camp. Wyoming - it was America's Serengeti. It was the mythical land they wrote their songs about. And it's gone." Through long interviews with Colton's family and friends, Fuller has created a version of his life. It's tough but lyrical, personal but anthropological, in the tradition of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood’
Daily Telegraph 14/6

‘How I Write’ feature
‘I’d originally glossed over the death scene in the hospital, and written something short and poetic, but Colton’s mother said, ‘No, you have to write it like I told you. I want everyone to know what it was like to lose a son’
Time Out 18/6

‘This is elegiac, poetic reportage, the reporter’s absence helping to tell the story more powerfully. It is, in its own words, ‘our new history of panic and greed, of loss and carelessness, etched like an accusation for the future to read’
Time Out 18/6

‘Her latest book – set in her new home, the high plains of Wyoming – hangs so faultlessly on its high-altitude, big-sky, oil-drilling bones that it seems not so much to have been written as uncovered by the wind and weather of the American north-west...like all westerns, this story is a tragedy before it even starts because there is no way a man like Colton can win against all the odds out there. Wyoming may be one of those places where the good die young. But in bringing Colton Bryant back to life on the page, Ms Fuller has had her own revenge’
Economist 21/5

‘It tells of the life and death of Colton, a sweet-natured kid from Wyoming whose inherent goodness overcomes the withering taunts thrown at him because of his learning difficulties. He lives a short, kind life, and dies a preventable death on one of the oil rigs that are disfiguring Wyoming’s pristine wilderness. It reads like a brilliant novel but it’s all true... “Colton stands as much for this brokenness that I think America represents as the fact that he was a cowboy and that icon is destroyed. The way America is now, that mould, that innocence, is over”’
Herald 7/6

‘If you ever doubted that there are still heroic, big-hearted men in the world, look no further than Colton H. Bryant, husband and father, roughneck on a Wyoming oil rig, who died young, a victim of corporate greed and neglect. It is to detract nothing from Alexandra Fuller’s personal style to say that she combines the best of Truman Capote’s technique in In cold Blood and the laconic literacy of E. Annie Proulx’s best Wyoming stories to infuse the biography of an ordinary working stiff with a truthful tenderness’
The Times 21/10

Interview
‘Wyoming has always been the still-beating cowboy heart of America, home of Buffalo Bill, the Rocky Mountains and the Great Plains. With a bison on its flag and the lowest population per square mile of any American state, it has long offered the lure of the wild, of eagles, clear water and big skies. Not any more, says Fuller. Wyoming is in the grip of an oil boom, as the Bush administration frantically attempts to find fuel sources to replace those cut off by the war in Iraq. “A quarter of Wyoming’s land mass is now under gas development. The 2005 energy bill rolled back environmental laws which go back to Nixon. I mean Nixon, who personally knew what needed to happen to protect us from the worst impulses of our greed and hubris, and here you have G W rolling it back”’
Irish Times 21/6
5-minute Interview slot
‘I wish people would take more notice of...everything, to be more aware of everything around them, or at least everything they consume, from fuel to plastic bags to love’
Independent 10/6

‘All the characters here silently and gracefully accept the fight they have on their hands which is a fig...

Alexandra Fuller was born in England in l969 and in 1972 she moved with her family to farm in Rhodesia. After the civil war there in 1981, the Fullers moved first to Malawi, then to Zambia. Fuller received a BA from Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada. She now lives in Wyoming and has three children.