A Far Country — Complete
1915
A meditation on ambition, identity, and the price of success in industrializing America, told through the retrospective voice of a corporation lawyer reckoning with his life. Hugh Paret, now a successful attorney on the Eastern Seaboard, looks back on the making of himself. Raised in a transforming city under the shadow of his stern Calvinist father, he chafed against constraint and climbed toward power. His journey through Harvard, his friendship with the earnest socialist Hermann Krebs who chose an honest path of protest, his entanglement with corrupt politics, and his unhappy marriage to Maude all become pieces in a larger examination of what it costs to become someone in America. Churchill writes with clear-eyed sympathy for a man who achieved everything and wonders if it was worth the price. The novel endures because it captures a fundamental American anxiety: the gap between becoming successful and becoming whole.
