The characters are described in a naturalistic manner, as people living in a specific milieu.

Other than the title location and the town of Signal which is the nearest settlement to the eponymous mountain, the settings are actual locations in the United States. The narrative is mostly linear, apart from an introductory prologue (which was accidentally omitted from the initial publication in The New Yorker magazine) the story describes events in sequence from a beginning point in time, the year 1963 when the characters are introduced, to the end of the story some 20 years later. The narrative is realistic in tone and employs description, metaphor and dialogue to examine the actions, thoughts, emotions, and motivations of its main characters. 'Brokeback Mountain' is a story told by an omniscient narrator. Over the next twenty years, as their separate lives play out with marriages, children, and jobs, they continue reuniting for brief liaisons on camping trips in remote settings. Unexpectedly, they form an intense emotional and sexual attachment, but have to part ways at the end of the summer. In 1963, two young men, Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, are hired for the summer to look after sheep at a seasonal grazing range on the fictional Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming. It premiered at the Teatro Real in Madrid on January 28, 2014. This story has also been adapted as an opera by the same name, composed by Charles Wuorinen with a libretto in English by Proulx. The story was also published separately in book form. At that time, the short story and the screenplay were published together, along with essays by Proulx and the screenwriters, as Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay. Screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana adapted the story for the 2005 film.

The collection was a finalist for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. A slightly expanded version of the story was published in Proulx's 1999 collection of short stories, Close Range: Wyoming Stories. It was originally published in The New Yorker on October 13, 1997, for which it won the National Magazine Award for Fiction in 1998. ' Brokeback Mountain' is a short story by American author Annie Proulx.

Brokeback mountain by annie proulx