Brokeback Mountain

Brokeback Mountain is a short story by the American writer Annie Proulx, first published in 1997 and later collected in Close Range: Wyoming Stories.

Ennis and Jack are hired for a summer of sheep herding at a distance from each other and from anybody else, and the isolation of the mountain is what makes the relationship possible. After the season they separate, marry, have children and take the jobs that are available to men like them, and the story follows the two of them across two decades of occasional meetings and letters that each of them keeps careful. Proulx writes the country as an economic fact rather than a backdrop: the work is hard, the wages are low, and the disapproval they would face is the ordinary opinion of everyone around them. The story is short and its later sections move quickly, so most of what happens to the two men is left to the reader.

Annie Proulx had been writing about Wyoming for years before this story, and it remains the best known of her short works.