Irving P. Beadle. Name a dime
novel and chances are it was written by Irving Beadle. Writing
these in the 1860's, Beadle was almost singlehandedIy responsible
for frontier fiction's bad reputation.
Max Brand, author of The
Untamed, is known as the "King of the Pulps." During
a career that started in 1918 he wrote 85 books, 55 stories,
201 novelettes, 196 serials, and two volumes of poetry
- Ivan Doig
The novels of this Northwestern alumnus are infused with the
author's Montana upbringing. After ten years of being supported
by his wife (another NU alum), he began making a living as a
writer in 1984, after the publication of his fourth book, English
Creek, which won him a $20,000 fellowship from the National
Endowment for the Arts.
- * Bucking the Sun
* Dancing at the Rascal Fair
* English Creek
* Heart Earth
* Mountain Time
* Ride with Me, Mariah Montana
* The Sea Runners
* This House of Sky, Landscapes of a Western Mind
* Winter Brothers: A Season at the Edge of America
* News, a consumer's guide
* The Streets We Have Come Down; Literature of the city
Robert E. Gard wrote Johnny
Chinook in 1967. The novel takes us on a fascinating tour
of Alberta, sampling some of the real larger-than-life characters
in our history.
Zane Grey, author of Riders
of the Purple Sage ( 1908) and 54 other novels, is one of
the best known western writers. The first of his books appeared
in 1908 and reprints are easily found in bookstores today.
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- Richmond P. Hobson Jr., rancher
and author of three wonderful books. A thrilling account of the
discovery and homesteading of the last great cattle frontier
in Northern British Columbia in the 1930's. I could not put these
books down
* Grass Beyond the Mountains
* Nothing To Good for a Cowboy
* Rancher Takes a Wife
Will James, author of The
Lone Cowboy, was a cowboy legend during the 1920's and 30's.
Known to most people as an American author, Will James was actually
born in Quebec in 1892 and learned his cowboy skills in western
Canada.
Louis L'Amour's novels have
been bestsellers for decades. Some of his books, like The Sackett
Brand ( 1965), are fictional histories of dynamic frontier
families.
Alfred Henry Lewis started writing
the Wolfville series in 1902. Followed by three other
books, it gave readers a taste of the true life of the cowboy
mixed with the tallest of tall tales.
Cormac McCarthy is one of the
best contemporary western writers in the United States. McCarthy
is the author of several novels, but All The Pretty Horses (1992) is a classic cowboy tale.
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- Norman Maclean best know for
his book, A River Runs Through It beginning
with the memorable line, "In our family, there was no clear
line between religion and fly fishing," Maclean paints an
evocative portrait of his own life with words to hold for an
extra moment so that they may be absorbed and not lost.
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- * A River Runs Through It
- * Young Men & Fire
- * American Author Series - Norman Maclean
Larry McMurty's Lonesome~Dove (1985) is one of a number of novels to be made into a television
program. The program and the book prove that western stories
still have a wide public appeal.
Clarence Mulford is famous as
the creator of Hopalong Cassidy. Hopalong made his debut
on the bookshelves in 1910.
Louise Riley wrote about' cowboy
life from a young boy's perspective. In 1950, her most famous
novel, The Mystery Horse was popular with young readers
throughout Canada.
Theodore Roosevelt wrote one
of the most famous and accurate accounts of the old west in the
1890's. Titled The Winning of the West, it aroused new
interest in the potential of the western frontier.
In 1920, Robert Stead's novel Dennison Grant set the tone for
many Canadian Western novels. His books were some of the first
to paint a true picture of Alberta's cowboy life.
Wallace Stegner is one of the
foremost names in western literature. One of his most famous
novels, Wolf Willow ( 1962) , is set in the Saskatchewan
prairies.
Saskatchewan author Guy Vanderhaege is an established novelist and short story writer. His book, The Englishman's Boy (1996) is historical fiction. .
In 1902 Owen Wister created
one of the most enduring cowboy heroes - The Virginian. The Virginian was based on the life of cowboy Eb Johnson.
American-born, Eb Johnson spent most of his life in southern
Alberta. By the 1960's, The Virginian- was made into a
popular TV series starring James Drury.
Paul Zarzyski, the recipient of the
2005 Governor’s Arts Award for Literature, has been spurring the words
wild across the open range of the page and calling it “Poetry” for
40 years. In the early ‘70s, he heeded Horace Greeley’s “go
west young man, go west”advice and received his Master of Fine Arts
degree in creative writing from The University of Montana, where he studied
with Richard Hugo. In the same breath, he took up a second lucrative vocation—bareback
bronc riding—and rode the amateur, the ProRodeo, and Senior circuits
into his early forties.. A few of his books:
* Zarzyski 51
* Wolf Tracks on the Welcome Mat,
* All this Way for the Short Ride
* Blue-Collar Light
*Words Growing Wild
* The Glorious Commotion of it all
* Rock'n Rowel
* Collision of Recklace Love
Find him at http://www.paulzarzyski.com
Wally McRae is a rancher, an American
cowboy, a cowboy poet and philosopher. He runs the 30,000-acre Rocker Six
Cattle Co. ranch on Rosebud
Creek south of Forsyth Montana. Wally McRae attended grade school and high
school at nearby Colstrip, Montana. He graduated from Montana State University
in 1958 in zoology and chemistry.
* Stick Horses and Other Stories of Ranch Life,
* Cowboy Curmudgeon and Other Poems
* Up North is Down the Crick: Poems.
Henry “Hank” Real Bird is
a rancher and educator who raises bucking horses on Yellow Leggins Creek
in the Wolf Teeth mountains
of Montana. Henry began working with the YMCA Writer’s Voice in 1992
as a visiting poet and has since shared his work and the Crow language with
thousands of students and teachers across Montana. As an instructor he infuses
a love of language and an appreciation of landscape into the minds of his audience
and students.
* Horse Tracks,
* Where Shadows Are Born,
* Beyond Reflection,
* Reflections and Shadow
* Best of Hank Real Bird
and more.
Jeannette Walls In The New York Times
Book Review of her book Half Broke Horses, critic Liesl Schillinger wrote, "Through
the adventures of Lily Casey — mustang breaker,
schoolteacher, ranch wife, bootlegger, poker player, racehorse rider, bush
pilot and mother of two — Walls revisits the adrenaline-charged frontier
background that gave her own mother a lifelong taste for vicissitude. 'I’m
an excitement addict,' Rose Mary Walls liked to tell her children. And yet — can
the contours of one woman’s life ever sufficiently explain the life
that proceeds from hers? Rose Mary eventually found an anchor in the form
of her daughter — the third generation of a line of indomitable women
whose paths she has inscribed on the permanent record, enriching the common
legend of our American past."Critic Janet Maslin wrote of Jeannette
Walls in The New York Times, "She has managed to make her second book
almost as inviting as her first, even though its upright heroine is never
as startling as Ms. Walls’s parents were."
Mackey Hedges: The Last Buckaroo, Told through the persona of narrator Tap
McCoy, a renegade, drifter, loner, and well-seasoned cowboy we experience
Tap's
happen
chance
meeting
with Dean
McCuen, a young drugstore cowboy from back east. While Tap just wants a ride
out of town, Dean believes he has found a sidekick and mentor. What follows
between Tap and the tag-a-long greenhorn is a rousin', ramblin' tale of their
exploits as they ride, rope, brand, and herd their way through ranches, pack
stations and feedlots all over the West. It's also a tale of camaraderie
and carousing as the two get thrown from their horses, tossed in jail, save
lives, see deaths, fight cowboys, and light up the pages with their escapades.
Mackey's unvarnished prose and salty style delight us with the life of a
fading tradition. Publishers' Weekly said of Mackey, "a buckaroo himself," he
spins a colorful yarn about 20th-century cowboys reminiscent of The Rounders." The
novel stands on its own as a classic and unique story of an American way
of life honoring the Western Lifestyle.
Ralph Owen Moody (December 16, 1898 – June 28, 1982) was an American
author who wrote 17 novels and autobiographies largely about the American
West (though a few are set in New England). He was born in East Rochester,
New Hampshire in 1898 but moved to Colorado with his family when he was eight
in the hopes that a dry climate would improve his father Charles's tuberculosis.
Moody detailed his experiences in Colorado in the first book of the Little
Britches series, Little Britches: Father and I Were Ranchers.
Mark Spragg is the author of Where
Rivers Change Direction, a memoir that won the Mountains & Plains
Independent Booksellers award, and the novels The Fruit of Stone and An Unfinished
Life,which was chosen by the Rocky
Mountain News as the Best Book of 2004. All three were top-ten Book Sense
selections and have been translated into fifteen languages.
Elinore Pruitt Stewart the author
of Letters
of a Woman Homesteader."Peopled with
the kinds of characters most novelists only dream of"(Christian
Science Monitor), this classic account of American frontier living captures
the rambunctious spirit of a pioneer who set out in 1909 to prove that a
woman could ranch. Stewart's captivating missives from her homestead in Wyoming
bring to full life the beauty, isolation, and joys of working the prairie.
