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.
Sons of Texas and The Raiders [two novels]
Sons of Texas and The Raiders [two novels]
Sons of Texas and The Raiders: Sons of Texas offers two classic novels of the Old West for one low price, by renowned Western writer Elmer Kelton.
It’s 1816. Mordecai Lewis, a veteran of Andrew Jackson’s campaigns who’s thirsting for action, leads his two sons and a band of backwoodsmen to Spanish-held Texas on a campaign to hunt wild horses. Their plan is to sell the mustangs back in Tennessee, but tragedy strikes when a bloody skirmish leaves Mordecai dead, and brothers Michael and Andrew are forced to fend for themselves.
Sons of Texas and The Raiders: Sons of Texas follow the lives and adventures of the Lewis family through the era of the Alamo and Texas Independence under Sam Houston. From stealing horses to falling in love to being dogged by the ruthless Spanish officer who killed their father, Michael and Andrew endure enough trials and tribulations to fill the whole of Texas.