The 1960s

The late 1960s were the moment when The Power of the Dog first met its reviewers: they recognized its tragic intensity, yet many framed it in terms that obscured the repressed sexuality at the center of its conflict. The decade thus records both the novel’s early literary acclaim and the distance between that acclaim and its limited readership.

Critical Response and Evasion

Reviewers in the late 1960s often acknowledged the novel’s interior tragedy while avoiding its treatment of homosexuality. Instead, they reduced its tensions to a contest between good and evil, cruelty and decent kindness, or what one review called a war between compulsion and intelligence. Those accounts recognized the suffering in the story but made its sexual conflict harder to see.

A More Direct Reading

An anonymous reviewer for Publishers Weekly offered a notably explicit account, despite objecting to the graphic calf-castration scene that opens the novel. The review identified the setting as Utah in 1924 and contrasted George Burbank, described as slow, clumsy, and essentially decent, with Phil Burbank, whom it called a repressed homosexual. It connected Phil’s persecution of George’s widowed wife to her secret drinking, then emphasized that her bright, strange young son, Peter Gordon, sees what is happening. The reviewer also recognized the paired plots beneath the domestic conflict: Phil is planning a sexual involvement with Peter, while Peter is devising a chilling revenge. In a period when other reviewers often softened or displaced the novel’s central conflict, this account made that conflict explicit.

Acclaim and Limited Circulation

The novel received strong critical praise in the late 1960s, with reviewers calling it a powerful tragedy and the year’s best novel. Roger Sale, writing in The Hudson Review, judged it the finest single book he knew about the modern West. That recognition did not translate into broad sales: the novel remained little read, and Emily Salkin of Little, Brown and Company later said she could not imagine its hardcover sales had exceeded 1,000 copies. The contrast between praise and circulation shaped the book’s early afterlife; its 2001 republication offered a neglected work another chance to reach readers.