Westerns
I have a wide definition of a “western” as a work of fiction. James Fenimore Cooper’s last Leatherstocking novel, The Prairie (1827), is a Western in even a modern sense of the category. The Dime Western of the post-Civil War period, and the sensational “yellow” Westerns that overlapped the end of the wars with the American Indians of the West created and strengthened the stereotypes and conventions that later generations of writers had to deal with.
What is important and interesting, however, is that those later generations of writers are good, sometimes great. From Zane Grey (Ohio-born) to Louis L’Amour, A.B. Guthrie to Larry McMurtry, Dorothy Johnson to Paulette Giles, Elmer Kelton to Elmore Leonard, Thomas McGuane to Edward Abbey to N. Scott Momaday - so many writers have faced and continue to face the West and its history and its landscape.
I have a Westerns section in the store in the far frontier of the North Room, but I have other Westerns scattered in different areas, outposts in other literatures. I will work to gather them on this page, an ongoing building of community. Audiobooks of Western writers, including Zane Grey and A.B. Guthrie, Jr., are listed on my Audiobooks - Fiction, Poetry, Drama page.
A note on Louis L’Amour’s books: they are listed in alphabetical order by title with the exception of the 17-volume Sacketts titles, which are clustered at the end and numbered according the rough chronology L’Amour intended (it was flexible by his intention and unfinished at his death).
Listed here alphabetically by author.
Rides of the Purple Sage and The Rainbow Trail
Rides of the Purple Sage and The Rainbow Trail
From the legendary writer of the west Zane Grey comes two complete novels in one low-priced edition, Riders of the Purple Sage and The Rainbow Trail
Riders of the Purple Sage
Zane Grey's most enduring classic--the book that invented the myth of the American West. In the little village of Cottonwoods, Utah, Mormon rancher Jane Withersteen endures persecution, religious zealots, and cattle rustlers trying to prey on her land. Aided by Lassiter, the famous gunman, Jane and her friends must escape the clutches of her most dangerous enemies.
The Rainbow Trail
John Shefford rode into Utah in search of a new life, and when he met Fay Larkin, a beautiful woman charged with murder, he knew he had found it. Breaking her out of jail was the easy part. Now he has a posse and violent bands of Indians to outrun; a murderous trek through a trackless waste; and a brutal passage through white-water hell.