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.
Jericho's Road and A Hard Trail to Follow [two novels]
Jericho's Road and A Hard Trail to Follow [two novels]
Books 6 & 7 in Elmer Kelton's acclaimed Texas Rangers series, offered together at one low price
Jericho’s Road
“This is Jericho’s Road. Take the Other.” When young Texas Ranger Andy Pickard is assigned to the Texas-Mexico border, he learns the meaning of this ominous notice on the edge of a great tract of land above the Rio Grande. Rancher Jericho Jackson is at war with a similarly ruthless cattle baron on the Mexican side of the river. The two men are rustling each other’s cattle, raiding and killing on both sides of the border, and heading for a bloody showdown—with only Pickard and his fellow Texas Rangers standing between them.
Hard Trail to Follow
Former Texas Ranger Andy Pickard is following the plow in West Texas when he learns that his friend, Sheriff Tom Blessing, has been killed during a jailbreak led by a man called Cordell. Reinstated as a Ranger so he can get justice for Tom Blessing, Andy pursues Cordell even as evidence mounts that the escaped man did not kill Blessing. Pickard will see justice done no matter what it takes.