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
Frederick Nolan is known for The Lincoln County War and The West of Billy the Kid. For theatre, he has written, Lorenz Hart: A Poet on Broadway. For Hollywood, Brass Target, and he is currently working on a screenplay about Billy the Kid and the Lincoln County War. He is also working on a novel, Kindly Direct Me to Hell, and a new pergola to support his wife Heidi’s Alexandra rose tree.
A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemingway
When I was 17, Frederic Henry’s philosophy of “drink deep and go a-whoring, love truly if you can, but never forget the world will get you in the end,” was enormously appealing. But when I grew up to be 21 and older, I came to recognize that the 1929 story of his doomed romance with the nurse Catherine Barclay was in fact a moving, deeply felt experience of war unlike any other I would ever read. It had and still has—for I go back to it often—a profound effect upon me and its ending is unforgettable. This is Hemingway at his utter peak—an Everest away from all the fake and sham that came later.
The Young Lions
Irwin Shaw
Of all the fine novels written about WWII—among my favorites are Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22—this 1949 tome is perhaps the finest, stirring, honest, authentic and memorable, the only one, I think, which tries convincingly to see the story from the German side as well as the American. I am not ashamed to say I went back to it for inspiration when I began to write fiction; it exerted a great influence on me as a model of how to tell a complex story truly, simply and sympathetically.
What Makes Sammy Run?
Budd Schulberg
A bit dated but, in its time (1941) and to a great extent still, a searing, scary, funny, authentic Hollywood novel about movie biz monster Sammy Glick, who leaves a trail of wrecked careers in his wake as he claws his way to the top in Tinseltown, observed with part awe and part disbelief by one of those beaten-up, worn-down narrators you only find in film noir. Glick’s tale, defined as “a blueprint of a way of life that was paying dividends in America in the first half of the 20th century,” makes this one of the most influential novels ever written about the movie world—yet it’s never been made into a film.
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