Cockfighter is a brutal, if beautiful, fiction loosely modeled on Homer's Odyssey. Frank Mansfield is the titular cockfighter—a silent and fiercely contrary man whose obsession with winning will cost him almost everything. Mansfield haunts the cockpits, bars, and roads of the rural South in the early 1960s, adrift but always capable of nearly anything. First published in complete form in 1972 and adapted by Willeford for the infamous Monte Hellman film in 1974. Introduction by Jesse Pearson.