Best Reads (And They Aren't All Westerns)
Western writers share the books that most influenced their lives and craft.
By: TW Editors 07/01/2007
Because of the environment in which I grew up, I always enjoyed books about cowboys. One that I read over several times and dearly loved was Cowboy, by Ross Santee, the story of a kid cowboy and his experiences on the range. At the University of Texas, I discovered We Pointed Them North, by E.C. “Teddy Blue” Abbott, which I still consider the best cowboy auto-biography, even above A Texas Cowboy, by Charlie Siringo. One which came along much later but ranks with those two is Dakota Cowboy, by Ike Blasingame. In visiting with the famous JA Ranch cowboy, the late Tom Blasingame, I found out Ike was his uncle.
The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck, stirred me in my high school years with its story of displaced farm folks in the drought and depression of the mid-1930s, a period I was old enough to remember. That book was part of the inspiration for my own The Time It Never Rained, about the drought of the 1950s.
Because Dobie lauded his work, I read several books by Eugene Manlove Rhodes, who wrote about New Mexico. I was haunted by the beauty and sentiment of his Paso Por Aqui, the story of a reluctant cowboy bank robber and his sacrifice for a poor Mexican family. It eventually became one of my favorite Western films, Four Faces West, with Joel McCrea at his very best.
In school, I naturally read Shakespeare, Hemingway and the many other classic writers my teachers urged upon me, but those never influenced me as much as the ones which reflected my own environment and my own people. As a budding Western writer, I studied the works of then-contemporary figures such as Ernest Haycox, Luke Short and S. Omar Barker, learning as much as I could from them about the art and craft of the Western story. For whatever successes I have had in my own writing career, I owe a great debt to all those writers under whom I studied and who I never met, except on the pages of their books.
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