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 Mysterious Rider
The Mysterious Rider
From a master storyteller of Old West adventures comes this novel of romance and redemption. Zane Grey, author of Riders of the Purple Sage, introduces Hell-Bent Wade, a gunfighter with a shadowy past. Wade arrives at a Colorado homestead where a young woman is being pressured into matrimony. Rancher Bill believes that marriage to Columbine, his foster daughter, will steady his wild and unruly son, Jack. Columbine is torn between her feelings of duty and affection for the old man, who raised her as his own child, and her blossoming love for a young ranch hand, Wilson Moore. Columbine's dilemma seems impossible to resolve — until tragedy, fate, and the mysterious rider intervene.Readers with a taste for classic Westerns will appreciate this story's spirited, well-drawn characters and its evocative descriptions of the frontier's natural beauty.
Reprint of the Grosset & Dunlap, New York, 1921 edition.