Gold: The Marvellous History of General John Augustus Sutter

Description

In January 1848 John Augustus Sutter, 'the first American millionaire' was ruined by one blow of a pickaxe. That blow revealed gold in one of the streams in Sutter's Californian estate, triggering the Gold Rush that brought hordes of greedy miners from every corner of the world to Sutter's vast domain. GOLD, Blaise Cendrars' first novel, is the story of this bankrupt Swiss papermaker who abandoned his family and made his way to America to seek his fortune. From New York he pushed westward, eventually acquiring a huge tract of land of which he was virtually an independent ruler and which was on the point of making him 'the richest man in the world' when the Gold Rush brought disaster. For the last thirty years of his life Sutter tried vainly to get compensation from the US government. He died in 1880, a broken old man. Cendrars spent fifteen years translating Sutter's life-story into fiction, departing (often radically) from the known historical facts to reshape the story of one of the great American pioneers with the pure gold of his own imagination. Published in 1924 GOLD is a work of breathless pace, fantastic humour and soaring invention: an extraordinary story extraordinarily told. In 1936 Cendrars went to Hollywood to work on the movie version, 'Sutter's Gold'.

Blaise Cendrars was the author of more than 20 books and his works have been translated into 11 languages. A founder of the modern movement in literature, he inspired poets from John Dos Passos to Patti Smith.

'Cendrars winds the history of Europe, the Spanish Empire and the United States around his hero like a cloak of flames that throw a light on a terrifying history... The brevity of GOLD is deceptive; its language is the work of a poet who can conjure up the world and its bewildering people in a paragraph.' - NY TIMES BOOK REVIEW 'No-one could be better suited to tell Sutter's story than his fellow-countryman and adventurer Blaise Cendrars, whose jeweller's eye was finely focused on all that glisters. The startling incongruity of the mock-naive tone in which Cendrars recounts this long, cruel joke is supremely effective. First published in 1925 or four years before rags-to-riches stories became commonplace, Cendrars' first novel remains a minor masterpiece.' - TLS 'A supreme work of fiction.' - GUARDIAN 'Wise, weird and poignant... a wonderful modernist fable.' - NEWSWEEK