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
Farewell, My Lovely
Raymond Chandler
To my mind, this 1940 novel is the best of the Philip Marlowe oeuvre, and that alone is a considerable accolade. Like his hero, “neither tarnished nor afraid,” Chandler followed the trail down the mean streets blazed by Dashiell Hammett and went on to take the whole Private Eye genre out of the pulp magazines, remaking it as literature with a pithy, witty, elegant style that hasn’t been bettered to the present day. Anyone who describes a blonde as having “the kind of figure that would make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window” is my kind of writer.
The Saga of Billy the Kid
Walter Noble Burns
When I came upon this book in 1952 and thought it new, I was completely enchanted by the picture it painted of a young, brave, daring lad catapulted into a series of events that would have taxed an Achilles. It was so real, so immediate, the interviews with people who had known the Kid so convincing, that I swallowed it hook, line and sinker. The 1926 work was a myth, of course, but it was and remains a powerful influence; it’s been one of my favorite books about the West for more than half a century.
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Of all the stories of the Jazz Age, this is the finest; and the picture it paints of a man desperately wanting to be someone he can never be, and who is prepared to go to any lengths to get what he wants, is elegant, romantic in an old-fashioned way and quite unforgettable. Gatsby, the patron saint of all the men who ever fell in love with the wrong woman, and Fitzgerald, the patron saint of boozed-out writers, are an unbeatable combination. As if that were not enough, the 1925 novel ends with what I think is the finest last sentence ever written by any novelist, anywhere.
Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy
Until I read Blood Meridian, Paul Horgan’s A Distant Trumpet was my favorite novel of the Old West. Good as it is, however, it doesn’t even get near this 1985 novel. The sheer savagery of the storyline, the unsparing clarity of the writing and the awesome strength of the narrative paint a chillingly believable picture of what it might have been like to live outside the law on the dangerous edges of the Western frontier. Any understanding I have of men such as Billy the Kid has been colored by it; how fine that the author’s surname should be the same as Billy’s mother’s surname!
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