A 116-page novella that covers one man's entire life in the American West, from 1917 to 1968. Robert Grainier loses everything to a wildfire and just keeps going. Johnson writes with the compression of poetry; whole years pass in a sentence, and then a single afternoon gets five pages because that's where the grief lives. Pulitzer finalist in 2012, and it probably should have won.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.