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.
Treasure Mountain [#13 in The Sacketts series]
Treasure Mountain [#13 in The Sacketts series]
In Treasure Mountain, Louis L’Amour delivers a robust story of two brothers searching to learn the fate of their missing father—and finding themselves in a struggle just to stay alive.
Orrin and Tell Sackett had come to exotic New Orleans looking for answers to their father’s disappearance twenty years before. To uncover the truth, the brothers enlisted the aid of a trailwise Gypsy and a mysterious voodoo priest as they sought to re-create their father’s last trek. But Louisiana is a dangerous land, and with one misstep the brothers could disappear in the bayous before they even set foot on the trail—a trail that led to whatever legacy their father had left behind . . . and a secret worth killing for.