Argall : The True Story of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith

by Vollmann, William (Author)

• ISBN13: 9780142001509
• ISBN10: 0142001503
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-12-01
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)

Summary

In Argall, the newest novel in his Seven Dreams series, William T. Vollmann alternates between extravagant Elizabethan language and gritty realism in an attempt to dig beneath the legend surrounding Pocahontas, John Smith, and the founding of the Jamestown colony in Virginia-as well as the betrayals, disappointments, and atrocities behind it. With the same panoramic vision, mythic sensibility, and stylistic daring that he brought to the previous novels in the Seven Dreams series-hailed upon its inception as "the most important literary project of the '90s" (The Washington Post)-Vollmann continues his hugely original fictional history of the clash of Native Americans and Europeans in the New World. In reconstructing America's past as tragedy, nightmare, and bloody spectacle, Vollmann does nothing less than reinvent the American novel.

Author Biography

William T. Vollman, the author of eleven books, was named one of the twenty best writers in America under forty by the New Yorker. His 1996 collection, The Atlas, won the PEN/ Center USA West Award for Fiction. His writings have appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire, Spin, Gear, Grand Street, and Outside.

Table of Contents

Argall-Text: The Generall Historie of Virginia (1624)	1	(30)
Argall	31	(558)
Several Compass Circles, or, How Captaine John Smith Came Home and Home Again to Gravesend	35	(330)
Changes of the Moon, or, How Pokahuntiss Found Herself to Be Twice Married	365	(158)
The Golden Number, or, How Virginian Tides Became Accomptable to the Clock	523	(66)
Gravesend (1348--1996)	589	(82)
A Chronology of the Third Age of Wineland	671	(14)
Glossaries	685	(18)
Orthographic Note	685	(18)
Glossary of Personal Names	686	(4)
Glossary of Orders, Isms, Nations, Professions, Hierarchies, Races, Shamans, Tribes and Monsters	690	(3)
Glossary of Places	693	(3)
Glossary of Texts	696	(1)
Glossary of Calendars, Currencies, Legalisms and Measures	697	(1)
General Glossary	698	(5)
Sources (and a Few Notes)	703	(44)
Acknowledgements	747