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.
The Spoilers: A Klondike Gold Rush Adventure
The Spoilers: A Klondike Gold Rush Adventure
A lucky strike by a pair of prospectors turns into a nightmare when crooked politicians attempt to steal their claim. Loaded with action and romance, this 1906 bestseller recaptures the excitement of the Gold Rush era, when thousands of prospectors headed to Alaska in hopes of finding riches. Miners, gamblers, and fortune-hunters of every description populate these pages, chasing their dreams among the rowdy camps and boom towns of the frozen north.
Author Rex Beach, known as the Victor Hugo of the North, based this novel on a true series of events involving the theft of Yukon gold mines by corrupt politicians. Beach seasoned the dramatic tale with incidents from his own experiences prospecting for gold in Nome at the beginning of the twentieth century. Five different movie versions of The Spoilers include versions with John Wayne and Gary Cooper in the role of the rugged hero.
Reprint of the Harper & Brothers Publishers, New York, 1906 edition.