Fossil Fuel - Paperback

by David Thomas (Author)

Of David Thomas, the late detective novelist James Crumley wrote, "All of the old Missoula hands feel the same way about Dave: as if he is the national treasure of our small, but extended nation, a nation founded on those sixties ideals of love of language, a respect for hard work, friendships closer than blood . . . Dave Thomas has spent those years actually working at jobs most of us gave up in our youth, working on the railroad as a tie gang laborer, worked construction as a laborer, clean-up, and wheeled endless barrows of concrete . . . and obviously, he spent long hours writing in bars, on the roadside, and locked in small rooms all over the West working at his craft and art . . . the lonely ecstasy of putting down the words, doing the work all alone."- James Crumley, from the Forward to Thomas's Buck's Last Wreck (1996)

Author Biography

DAVID E. THOMAS grew up on the Hi-Line in North-central Montana. He graduated from the University of Montana then found himself on the streets of San Francisco where he began his literary education. Economic realities drove him to work on railroad gangs, big construction projects like Libby Dam and other labor intensive jobs. He has traveled in the United States, Mexico and Central America. He has published four books of poems, Fossil Fuel, Buck's Last Wreck, The Hellgate Wind and Waterworks Hill. He has poems in the anthologies The Last Best Place and Poems across the Big Sky and New Poets of the American West and has recently published poems in Romania, Blue Collar Review and Cedilla 6 and 7. Most recently his essay "Gothic Days" appeared in The Complete Montana Gothic edited by Peter Koch which also features Thomas's earliest published work. He currently lives in Missoula, Montana.