Hardscrabble: A Narrative of the California Hill Country

Hardscrabble: A Narrative of the California Hill Country by Kunkler, Anita. paperback edition. ISBN: 9780874170443.

Completed only a few months before her death in 1967, Anita Kunklers book provides an unadorned view of a young womans childhood experiences in the mountains of northern California. Hardscrabble is the story of a family and a region which long continued to mirror many of the earlier frontier practices of the West. In discussing her youth, Kunkler senses the richness, wildness, and warmth of the hill country and its people. Her memoir reflects the heroic geography of northern California, with its lushness of nature, and reveals the crude isolation, the harsh physical conditions, and the failures of life. Kunkler does not try to reach beyond herself; she does not try to create a fable. Rather, her story is genuine and candid. It is a story of community dances with local moonshine, bear hunts and a first train ride, cattle drive and itinerant sheep camps, and, finally, the collapse of a youthful paradise. Originally published by the University of Nevada Press in 1975, Hardscrabble is an ageless tale of a young persons yearnings - anxious to leave the home but wedded to the land and the people she knows and loves.