Like Going Home is an epic novel about coming of age in the turbulent 1960s, by one of the greatest undiscovered writers of that era, William Francis ("Wild Bill") Mudon of South Dakota and Denver. It was his first major work and has never before been published. Properly speaking, Like Going Home is a quartet of novellas, each published separately as a series of e--books and collected here for the complete printed edition. The first, "The Summer of Ballads (1966)," set in rural South Dakota, is a searing look at ranching and small town life as frontier values collide with the antiwar movement and the determination of one of Pierre's best and brightest sons, Zeno, to become a conscientious objector. Based on his own experiences growing up on the prairie, Mudon's characters are sharply drawn, deeply felt, and so vividly described that "you can just taste that dusty wind blowing in Zeno's face," as one reader put it. The second, "The Summer of Songs of Peace and Love (1967)," follows Zeno on his CO service to California, where he meets his lover Robin and encounters the sex, drugs, hippies and motorcycle gangs then running rampant. The third, "The Summer of the Opera of Death (1968)," finds a long-haired Zeno back at home and at odds with his family in a time of assassinations and riots, mourning his dying father, and planning for the ominous Chicago Democratic Convention that year. In the final novella of the quartet, "The Summer of Unfinished Symphony of Meaning (1969)," Zeno has become politically exhausted and retreated to a hermetic life in the Arizona desert, searching for spiritual epiphanies. Around the time of Woodstock, he is smuggling drugs to New York, playing in a band called "Dog Shit," and pondering the ambiguous prospects of coming full circle back to South Dakota. The publication of this book was made possible by a small group of friends who have long felt that Mudon never got the recognition he deserved while alive. He died in June, 2014, knowing that at least this taste of his canon will survive in the cloud forever.
About the Author: William Francis Mudon was born October 4, 1942, in Pierre, South Dakota, and died June 12, 2014, in Denver, Colorado. His father, George, was a salty French Catholic soldier and Golden Gloves boxer from New York, and his mother, Hazel Holland, was the Protestant and very proper daughter of a heroic Indian agent who defended the Sioux against white swindlers in South Dakota (Sitting Bull kept a cabin, and Custer's eyeglasses, on Holland's Missouri River ranchland). This improbable couple came together during the frenzied melting pot of early WWII. The family moved to Denver in the 1950s, where Mudon grew up next door to singer Judy Collins (who remained in touch until his death), spending his summers on his beloved ranch, idolizing rodeo stars like South Dakota's own Casey Tibbs. The young Mudon was a diffident and rebellious student, but a voracious reader, managing to graduate from Regis (Catholic) High School in Denver and the University of Colorado in Boulder in the 1960s. Scholarship was always less important to him than adventure; immediately after college, he shipped out on a Swedish freighter to Japan. Until disqualified by injury, he trained as an Army paratrooper. Always restless, he was known to show up or take off unpredictably. Mudon started writing around 1970, with the novels of Zane Grey, Jack London, Earnest Hemingway, James Joyce, Jack Kerouac, Larry McMurtry, and the films of Clint Eastwood among his major influences. This book, Like Going Home, was his first major product. Later in the 1970s he wrote what some consider his best novel, Adrian the Umbrella Man, about the escapades of an enlightened and surrealistic Sioux Indian at play in modern America. He also wrote The Mandala, a collection of short stories which included what became his only (self-) produced play, Brother George Goes to the Monastery (written both for and against his father). He produced a storage unit full of manuscripts, most still uncatalogued. Even to the end of his long bout with cancer he was working on what he thought might be his masterpiece, a Michener-like historical novel about his family ranch, from the days of Sitting Bull and John Holland to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' condemnation of their fertile bottomland to build the huge and destructive Oahe Reservoir. He should be remembered as perhaps the finest novelist that South Dakota ever produced, and one of the best in the American West for his time.