The Natural Man by Ed McClanahan
Published 1983 · 62,975 words · about 4 hours at an average pace
How hard is The Natural Man to read?
The Natural Man scores 45 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 45 out of 100
- Kentucky vernacular, rich but not obscure.
- Sentence structure: 48 out of 100
- Loose, talkative sentences.
- Abstraction: 42 out of 100
- Concrete small-town life.
- Information density: 45 out of 100
- Moderate.
- Narrative indirection: 42 out of 100
- A narrator remembering his own foolishness.
- Symbolic density: 45 out of 100
- Modest symbolic weight.
- Ironic distance: 58 out of 100
- Sustained comic distance from the younger self.
- Resolution withholding: 42 out of 100
- Most of it resolves.
- Structural complexity: 35 out of 100
- Linked episodes, broadly chronological.
How The Natural Man is regarded
The Natural Man holds a literary regard score of 38 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.