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 Good Old Boys and The Smiling Country
The Good Old Boys and The Smiling Country
The Good Old Boys and The Smiling Country pairs two wonderful novels by one of the most honored of all western writers, Elmer Kelton
The Good Old Boys
Hewey Calloway has a problem. He wants to be a footloose cowboy, endlessly wandering the land on horseback, but the open range of his childhood is slowly disappearing. Land is being parceled out, barbed-wire fences are springing up all over, and cars are replacing the horse as a mode of transportation. Swimming against the tide of “progress,” Hewey begins to understand that the time of the cowboy is over, that the life he dreams of has become part of the past. He must find a new path to happiness—one that may require a great sacrifice.
The Smiling Country
It is now 1910 and Hewey Calloway’s freewheeling life is coming to an end—the fences, trucks, and automobiles he hates are even creeping in to remote Alpine in the “smiling country” of West Texas. When he is badly injured trying to break a renegade horse, Hewey’s regrets over his lost love, schoolteacher Spring Renfro haunt him as he sees the loneliness that awaits him. The Smiling Country is filled with humor, love, and the lore of the cowboy life at a time when the great, free, open ranges of the West were adjusting to a new, technological era.