Matthiessen's persistent concern with a primitive landscape bearing the incursion of white "civilization" is represented in Killing Mister Watson. However, instead of displacing this fundamental conflict to South America or the Caribbean, Matthiessen sets it in America, on the west coast of the Florida Everglades. It is here, among the "dark mangrove walls closing out the world, with the empty Everglades to eastward where the sun rose, and that empty Gulf out to the west where the sun set, the silence and miskeeters and the loneliness," that Matthiessen locates his chronicle of the life and death of Edgar J. Watson — farmer, businessman, and outlaw gunman.
Matthiessen has at times been criticized for his tendency to posit the superiority of the primitive over the civilized, but in Killing Mister Watson there is no "primitive" who.....
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