Fiction. Jimbo Stark, teenage soldier of fortune, loves, fights, drinks, mopes, and steals his way through this brilliant novel of the late 1950s. His America glows with an almost romantic light—it is an electric, song-filled garden for teenage love, where everything is possible, even heroism. Imagining himself sometimes as James Dean's reincarnation, sometimes as a beatnik gangster poet straight out of Jack Kerouac, Jimbo lives a legend of his own construction. THE SILVER GHOST is a wonderful novel of coming of age in America—letter perfect in its evocation of an almost mythical time, and powerfully affecting in its portrait of its hero. In a dazzlingly shifting series of set-pieces, flashbacks, and reveries, Chuck Kinder cuts back and forth from caper to sentiment to myth, from self-pity to self-mockery. With deft comic sense, a complex and winning hero, and a supporting cast of vividly realized characters, Kinder writes about Jimbo Stark with the same mixture of fond memory and relief that it's over that we all have toward that time when we, too, were perfectly seventeen; he makes THE SILVER GHOST one of the very best—and most sensationally written—novels of adolescence.

The Silver Ghost

Kinder, Chuck

Harcourt, Brace. Jovanovich

Chronicles the misadventures of promising writers Ralph Crawford and Jim Stark and their wives, in a story of friendship, betrayal, and the ups and downs of the writer's life.

Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale

Literature & Fiction

Humor & Satire

Farrar. Straus & Giroux

Snakehunter

Fiction. "SNAKEHUNTER is an excellent novel about a West Virginia childhood. Kinder has, to begin with, a good sense of his region: he has rested his story on the firmest possible bases, namely character and place. His dialogue, particularly that of his female characters, is first rate.... One would like to secure for this excellently crafted book all the readers one can."—Larry McMurty, The Washington Post

Knopf: distributed by Random House

Chuck Kinder's long-awaited and critically acclaimed magnum opus chronicles the misadventures of best friends Ralph Crawford and Jim Stark, two of the most promising writers of their day, and the wives with whom they have spent the best years of their lives raising bad judgment to an art. Kinder captures the late 60's and early 70's in all their splendor and as pointed out in The New York Times Book Review, "It is undoubtedly possible to read this book without knowing that Kinder was a close friend of Raymond Carver. But many of those who pick up this volume about two bad-boy American writers in the making will recognize the general outline of Carver's life." With affection and self-savaging wit, Kinder captures the siren song of the writer in all its squalor and glory. Honeymooners is both an homage to and a debunking of that mythical figure-the alcoholic, womanizing, swaggering male author.

Contemporary

Plume

Fiction. Jimbo Stark, teenage soldier of fortune, loves, fights, drinks, mopes, and steals his way through this brilliant novel of the late 1950s. His America glows with an almost romantic light—it is an electric, song-filled garden for teenage love, where everything is possible, even heroism. Imagining himself sometimes as James Dean's reincarnation, sometimes as a beatnik gangster poet straight out of Jack Kerouac, Jimbo lives a legend of his own construction. THE SILVER GHOST is a wonderful novel of coming of age in America—letter perfect in its evocation of an almost mythical time, and powerfully affecting in its portrait of its hero. In a dazzlingly shifting series of set-pieces, flashbacks, and reveries, Chuck Kinder cuts back and forth from caper to sentiment to myth, from self-pity to self-mockery. With deft comic sense, a complex and winning hero, and a supporting cast of vividly realized characters, Kinder writes about Jimbo Stark with the same mixture of fond memory and relief that it's over that we all have toward that time when we, too, were perfectly seventeen; he makes THE SILVER GHOST one of the very best—and most sensationally written—novels of adolescence.

United States

Braddock Avenue Books

Last Mountain Dancer: Hard-Earned Lessons in Love, Loss, and Honky-Tonk Outlaw Life

On sabbatical from his professorship at the University of Pittsburgh, native West Virginian Chuck Kinder (portrayed as Grady Tripp in Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys and played by Michael Douglas in the film) makes a midlife pilgrimage to his homeland to re-imagine and reconnect with that fabled, fantastic country. Confronting the regrets and heartaches of his past, present, and future, Kinder seeks solace in the funny and raunchy family stories, lies, legends, and history that reside in West Virginia’s haunted hills and the hollows of his memory. But more than anything, Kinder wants to live it up hillbilly style. Immersing himself among the lives of mountaineer characters, both the quick and the dead, the bad-boy author bears holy witness to the triumphs and misdeeds of the loafers and misfits, winos and oddball characters of his homeland. Readers will be astonished by tales of bloody mine wars, outlaws on the run, roadhouse romance, barroom brawlers, beer-joint ballerinas, and a man who calls himself the last mountain dancer. With mothmen, moonshiners, and family feudists, it’s Planet West Virginia. Chuck Kinder's wild-ride rediscovery of his West Virginian roots is sure to quicken all of our hillbilly hearts.

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Carroll&Graf

On sabbatical from his professorship at the University of Pittsburgh, native West Virginian Chuck Kinder (portrayed as Grady Tripp in Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys and played by Michael Douglas in the film) makes a midlife pilgrimage to his homeland to re-imagine and reconnect with that fabled, fantastic country. Confronting the regrets and heartaches of his past, present, and future, Kinder seeks solace in the funny and raunchy family stories, lies, legends, and history that reside in West Virginia's haunted hills and the hollows of his memory. But more than anything, Kinder wants to live it up hillbilly style. Immersing himself among the lives of mountaineer characters, both the quick and the dead, the bad-boy author bears holy witness to the triumphs and misdeeds of the loafers and misfits, winos and oddball characters of his homeland. Readers will be astonished by tales of bloody mine wars, outlaws on the run, roadhouse romance, barroom brawlers, beer-joint ballerinas, and a man who calls himself the last mountain dancer. With mothmen, moonshiners, and family feudists, it's Planet West Virginia. Chuck Kinder's wild-ride rediscovery of his West Virginian roots is sure to quicken all of our hillbilly hearts.

Da Capo Press

At Stanford Chuck Kinder became close friends with fellow students Raymond Carver, Larry McMurtry, and Scott Turow. His relationship with Carver inspired his novel Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale, which for nearly twenty years had vexed Kinder and had grown, uncontrollably, into a sprawling manuscript of over 3,000 pages at one point. Kinder's struggle with this manuscript was local legend at the University of Pittsburgh. Michael Chabon, once an undergraduate student of Kinder's, used it as inspiration for the character Grady Tripp in the 1995 novel Wonder Boys. This new edition of Honeymooners contains the "lost chapters."

Literary

Carnegie-Mellon University Press

Fiction. "SNAKEHUNTER is an excellent novel about a West Virginia childhood. Kinder has, to begin with, a good sense of his region: he has rested his story on the firmest possible bases, namely character and place. His dialogue, particularly that of his female characters, is first rate.... One would like to secure for this excellently crafted book all the readers one can."—Larry McMurty, The Washington Post

Gnomon Press

This gonzo-style metamemoir follows Chuck Kinder on a wild tour of the back roads of his home state of West Virginia, where he encounters Mountain State legends like Sid Hatfield, Dagmar, Robert C. Byrd, the Mothman, Chuck Yeager, Soupy Sales, Don Knotts, and Jesco White, the “Dancing Outlaw.”

West Virginia University Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Kinder, Chuck. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Kinder, Chuck

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Kinder, Chuck. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Silver Ghost

Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale

Snakehunter

Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale

The Silver Ghost

Last Mountain Dancer: Hard-Earned Lessons in Love, Loss, and Honky-Tonk Outlaw Life

Last Mountain Dancer: Hard-Earned Lessons in Love, Loss, and Honky-Tonk Outlaw Life

Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale

Snakehunter

Last Mountain Dancer: Hard-Earned Lessons in Love, Loss, and Honky-Tonk Outlaw Life