E. Annie Proulx shared the story ‘Brokeback Mountain’ on this day

In 1997 author E. Annie Proulx’s short story Brokeback Mountain was published in The New Yorker magazine.

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It would go on to win the USA’s National Magazine Award for Fiction in 1988. In 1999 the author released a short story collection called Close Range: Wyoming Stories that included a slightly expanded version of the story.

The tale follows the lives of Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, who are hired to watch over cattle at a seasonal grazing range on the fictional Brokeback Mountain. 

Alone in the remote campsite they begin a sexual and romantic relationship, and although they go on to have wives, families and careers – for the next twenty years they meet up once a year to continue their love affair.

Screenwriters Larry McMurty and Diana Ossana adapted the story for the screen and it became an award winning film in 2005 starring Perth’s Heath Leger and American actor Jake Gyllenhaal.

The story has since been adapted in an opera and a theatrical play that premiered on the West End.

Proulx has said she wrote the story over a six month period, and it went through as many as sixty different drafts. Along the way it changed names from The Pleasures of Whiskey Mountain, to Bulldust Mountain, Swill-Swallow Mountain, and Drinkard Mountain, before she finally settled on Brokeback Mountain.

In a 2008 interview the author said she regretted writing the story because now she receives hundreds of fan fiction takes on her tale.

“They constantly send ghastly manuscripts and pornish rewrites of the story to me, expecting me to reply with praise and applause for “fixing” the story. They certainly don’t get the message that if you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it.” Proulx said.

Proulx’s novel The Shipping News has also been adapted for the screen.