By Photo: Jeffrey Beall / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0
The Western novel has been written off many times, and it keeps coming back. These twelve books span a century, and each one changed how the West was written. Two of them are set close to home: one in Wyoming’s ranch country, one along the South Platte in Weld County.
- Owen Wister, The Virginian (1902). The novel that set the pattern for the cowboy hero, set in Wyoming Territory around Medicine Bow. The Virginian Hotel, built in Medicine Bow in 1911, takes its name from the book.
- Zane Grey, Riders of the Purple Sage (1912). The best known of Grey’s many novels, set in the canyon country of southern Utah.
- Walter Van Tilburg Clark, The Ox-Bow Incident (1940). A short, dark novel about a lynch mob in 1880s Nevada and what it means to go along with the crowd.
- A.B. Guthrie Jr., The Big Sky (1947). The fur-trade West of the 1830s and 1840s, told without romance.
- Jack Schaefer, Shane (1949). A homesteading family in Wyoming in 1889 and the stranger who rides in. Short enough to read in an evening.
- Louis L’Amour, Hondo (1953). The book that made L’Amour’s name. See our profile of L’Amour.
- Alan Le May, The Searchers (1954). The basis for the John Ford film, and in some ways a harder book.
- Thomas Berger, Little Big Man (1964). A comic, sprawling send-up of Western legend, narrated by a 111-year-old man.
- Charles Portis, True Grit (1968). Mattie Ross’s voice is one of the great narrative voices in American fiction.
- Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose (1971). Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, it follows a 19th-century woman through mining camps that include Leadville, Colorado.
- James A. Michener, Centennial (1974). A huge novel about the fictional town of Centennial on the South Platte in northeastern Colorado. Readers in Weld County will recognize the irrigation colonies, the cattle trails and the beet fields.
- Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove (1985). Two retired Texas Rangers drive a herd to Montana. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the basis for a celebrated miniseries.
Also worth a look
Readers who finish the list might try Oakley Hall’s Warlock (1958), Elmer Kelton’s The Time It Never Rained (1973) and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985). For shorter work, see our list of Western short-story collections.
Sources
- Publisher and Library of Congress catalog records.
- The Pulitzer Prizes, fiction winners.
- Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office, Virginian Hotel listing.
