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.
Bugles in the Afternoon
Bugles in the Afternoon
Rumors of a campaign against Sitting Bull cut through the ranks like a cold wind. Who would lead the charge? In Bugles in the Afternoon, legendary Western writer Ernest Haycox relates a compelling tale of Custer’s famed Seventh Cavalry and its fate at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in a balanced mix of action, exposition, and history.
Originally published in 1943, this classic work is now back in print in a new paperback edition. Historian Richard W. Etulain examines the novel’s history and Haycox’s impact on a timeless genre in an original foreword. Ernest Haycox Jr. provides unique insight into his father’s writing regimen and commitment to authenticity in his introduction.