Cockfighter

Résumé : Considered to be Charles Willeford's masterpiece, Cockfighter is a brutal, if beautiful, fiction of the American South loosely modelled, according to the author, on Homer's Odyssey. Frank Mansfield is the titular cockfighter - a silent and fiercely contrary man whose obsession with winning will cost him almost everything. Mansfield haunts the cockpits, bars and roads of the rural South in the early 1960s, adrift but always capable of nearly anything. First published in complete form in 1972 and adapted for the infamous Monte Hellman film in 1974, it has been out of print for 20 years.