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"Western fiction" may reasonably be called a piece of long fiction with all or most of five ingredients in varying degrees of importance. First, it stresses the land—vast, overwhelming, including gardens and deserts, with mountains and storms in between—usually west of the Mississippi River and south of Canada, but often down into Mexico. Second, it features a loner as hero—often tight-lipped about a shadowy past, usually handy with fists, guns, and horses, and always restless. Third, it is filled with violent action, at the end of which evil is usually destroyed. Fourth, it relates, though often only indirectly, to real events in Western history—having to do with pioneering, fighting Indians, crime, ranching, or homesteading. And fifth, it often includes women, but typically in minor roles—for example, schoolteachers, ranchers’ daughters, or 'soiled doves.'"
All the Pretty Horses by
Now a major motion picture from Columbia Pictures starring Matt Damon, produced by Mike Nichols, and directed by Billy Bob Thornton. The national bestseller and the first volume in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, All the Pretty Horses is the tale of John Grady Cole, who at sixteen finds himself at the end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself. With two companions, he sets off for Mexico on a sometimes idyllic, sometimes comic journey to a place where dreams are paid for in blood. Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction. From the Trade Paperback edition.
Early Novels and Stories by
"Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet." Willa Cather's remark describes her own reasons for re-creating in her works the Nebraska frontier of her youth. Set on the vast northern Great Plains, where the earth has only recently come beneath the plow, the stories and novels in this Library of America volume partake of an impressive physical space and a uniquely American ethnic. Panoramas of lonely prairie and open sky reflect the heroic aspirations and stoicism of her characters and the rebelliousness of their spirit. The Troll Garden (1905) was Cather's first book of fiction. It contains seven stories, including the justly famous "Paul's Case," a study of a young man who escapes the world of the ordinary and briefly tastes the life of romance. Also included is "The Sculptor's Funeral," about a world-famous young artist who remains without honor in his native town. O Pioneers! (1913) is the story of a young Swedish-American girl, Alexandra Bergson, who is left to manage the homestead farm when her father dies. Although she must contend with the shiftlessness of two brothers and the brutal murder of a third, her instinctive identification with the forces of nature helps bring the land to abundant fruition, and she finds her own happiness in a kindred spirit--an engraver, gold prospector, and fellow dreamer. In her lyrical novel The Song of the Lark (1915), Cather's love of music and theater and her faith in the spiritual influence of the Western landscape find expression in the ardent and talented Thea Kronborg. Moving from Colorado to Chicago to the primitive Southwest, Thea finds her destiny not in romance, but as a great Wagnerian soprano in the Metropolitan Opera. Her success, and that of all Cather's heroines, derives from what the author calls "the naïve, generous country that gave on its joyous force." A masterpiece at once austere and exuberant, historical and mythical, My Ántonia (1918) portrays a family of Bohemian emigrants on the Nebraska frontier. Despite the suicide of her father and the desertion of the father of her child, Ántonia Shimerda retains an unselfish nature that allows her to undergo years of drudgery and still affirm a courageous passion for life and motherhood--a dauntlessness intrinsically rooted in the awesome wonder of the prairie. One of Ours, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1922, portrays the blighting effects of twentieth-century progress on a free spirit from the American frontier. Claude Wheeler, its hero, is an imaginative, restless young man who leaves his claustrophobic small town to become a soldier in France during World War I. The Old World shows him culture, art, generosity, and appreciation, and also the horror, waste, and tragedy of war.
Lonesome Dove by
Bestselling winner of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize, "Lonesome Dove" is an American classic. First published in 1985, Larry McMurtry's epic novel combined flawless writing with a storyline and setting that gripped the popular imagination, and ultimately resulted in a series of four novels and an Emmy-winning television miniseries. Now, with an introduction by the author, "Lonesome Dove" is reprinted in an S&S Classic Edition. "Lonesome Dove," by Larry McMurtry, the author of "Terms of Endearment," is his long-awaited masterpiece, the major novel at last of the American West as it really was. A love story, an adventure, an American epic, "Lonesome Dove" embraces "all" the West -- legend and fact, heroes and outlaws, whores and ladies, Indians and settiers -- in a novel that recreates the central American experience, the most enduring of our national myths. Set in the late nineteenth century, "Lonesome Dove" is the story of a cattle drive from Texas to Montana -- and much more. It is a drive that represents for everybody involved not only a daring, even a foolhardy, adventure, but a part of the American Dream -- the attempt to carve out
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by
“Bury my heart at Wounded Knee,” writes poet Stephen Vincent Benet in his poem “American Names.” It’s a phrase that author Dee Brown makes literal in his novel of the same name. In Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Brown recounts the tragic massacre of the Native American tribes in the late 1800s, honestly and provocatively giving a voice to a moral horror that America too often tries to hide.
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