Bio of james lee burke

In his thirteen novels, James Lee Burke sets up a basic confrontation between the beauties of the natural world and the stark, cruel, marginal existence of his characters. When he writes about the natural world of the Texas-Louisiana Gulf Coast with its swamps and bayous, or the blue mountains of Montana, he produces a poetic and lyrical prose, filled with affirmation and awe, based solidly on his descriptions and evocations of the weather, light, aromas, and colors.

Such a world appears Edenic and, for the most part, unspoiled. Burke writes with a Thoreauvian attention to detail and a Whitmanic delight in the sheer boundlessness of nature, as in Burke's To the Bright and Shining Sun.

Such a romantic sense of oneness and transcendence parallels his characters' often thwarted desire for escape, sex, occasional love, country music, and jazz. Titles such as A Morning for Flamingos, A Stained White Radiance, Sunset Limited, Neon Rain, and Heaven's Prisone