Life's Lure

John G Neihardt author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:University of Nebraska Press

Published:1st Sep '91

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Life's Lure cover

Coming four years after The Dawn Builder (1910), John G. Neihardt's second novel portrays the lives of Black Hills miners and of those who preyed on them. Life's Lure takes up a theme that runs throughout Neihardt's work: the consequences of an inordinate desire for wealth.

The protagonists come in sets of three. On one hand there are Samuel Drake, a hapless thirty-year-old who has just squandered his inheritance in a Deadwood card game; his fickle wife Joy; and Louis Devlin, a smooth-talking, fast-fingered gentleman gambler. Devlin is not above talking about philosophy; he even paraphrases Nietzsche. On the other hand are Monte Joe, a drunken scoundrel, Punkins, a young man fresh off the farm, guileless and easy pickings; and Nellie, a mining-camp prostitute.

Women and gold lure men to go on living, but Fortune is "a capricious jilt." Neihardt puts a lot of colorful characters in motion and then, along with the reader, watches them collide.

ISBN: 9780803233331

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 397g

277 pages