E. Annie Proulx shared the story ‘Brokeback Mountain’ on this day
In 1997, author E. Annie Proulx’s short story Brokeback Mountain was published in The New Yorker magazine.
It would go on to win the USA’s National Magazine Award for Fiction in 1998. In 1999, the author released a short-story collection called Close Range: Wyoming Stories that included a slightly expanded version of the story.
The tale follows the lives of Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, who are hired to watch over cattle at a seasonal grazing range on the fictional Brokeback Mountain. Alone in the remote campsite, they begin a sexual and romantic relationship. Although they later have wives, families and careers, they continue their love affair by meeting periodically over the next twenty years.
Screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana adapted the story for the screen, and it became an award-winning film in 2005 starring Perth-born actor Heath Ledger and American actor Jake Gyllenhaal.
The story has since been adapted into an opera and a theatrical play that premiered in London’s West End.
Proulx has said she wrote the story over a six-month period, and it went through as many as 60 different drafts. Along the way, it changed names from The Pleasures of Whiskey Mountain to Bulldust Mountain, Swill-Swallow Mountain, and Drinkard Mountain before she finally settled on Brokeback Mountain.
In a 2008 interview, the author said she regretted writing the story because she now receives hundreds of fan-fiction interpretations of her work.
“They constantly send ghastly manuscripts and pornish rewrites of the story to me, expecting me to reply with praise and applause for ‘fixing’ the story. They certainly don’t get the message that if you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it,” Proulx said.
Proulx’s novel The Shipping News has also been adapted for the screen.
