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.
Lando [#7 in The Sacketts series]
Lando [#7 in The Sacketts series]
In Lando, Louis L’Amour has created an unforgettable portrait of a unique American hero.
For six long years Orlando Sackett survived the horrors of a brutal Mexican prison. He survived by using his skills as a boxer and by making three vows. The first was to exact revenge on the hired killers who framed him. The second was to return to his father. And the third was to find Gin Locklear. But the world has changed a lot since Lando left it. His father is missing. The woman he loves is married. And the killers want him dead. Hardened physically and emotionally, Lando must begin an epic journey to resolve his past, even if it costs him his life.