Annie Proulx wrote The Half-Skinned Deer for an anthology of short stories called Off the Beaten Path. It was inspired by a visit she had made to a preserve run by the Nature Conservancy after they had invited her to look around the park and to write something that she felt represented what she had seen there. Proulx also added the story to another anthology of her work, At Close Range : Wyoming Stories.
The Half-Skinned Steer tells the story of an eighty-three year old man named Mero who attends his brother's funeral and whilst there is forced to confront the issues of his past, and also to face his feelings about his own mortality.
The story includes some brutal scenes of animal slaughter, which is typical of Proulx, who has a reputation for juxtaposing harsh realism and the beauty of vast, wide-open spaces. Despite sometimes presenting the reader with imagery that is genuinely upsetting, Proulx had a deep and abiding reverence for the outdoors and a love of the natural world, which had been instilled in her by her mother who was a naturalist and a painter. It was whilst living an isolated life after college that she began writing short stories and essays, but it was for writing her second novel, The Shipping News, that she became most famous, and also most decorated, winning both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for Fiction in 1993.
