Loree's Top Ten Books of the West

Literature of the American West encompasses many things. Fiction, poetry, memoir, biography, travelogue and historical texts can all be found beneath its broad banner. Coming up with just ten titles, then, is a ridiculous exercise. There are so many other books I could have included. Books such as...

Travels With Charley was probably the first book to put 'the West' on my radar when I was just 11 or 12 years old was. We'd probably been reading Of  Mice and Men or The Red Pony at school, and rather than turning me off of Steinbeck - as so often happens when books are studied at that age - it sparked a love which continues to this day. The book recounts the journey Steinbeck made around the perimeter of the United States in 1960, in the company of his standard poodle, Charley. It was probably the dog that first attracted me to the book, but it's the movement of the narrative which really sticks with me. Travels is not about the West at all, of course, but rather about America's insatiable need to press forward - often at its own detriment - and that need is central to what created the West, in myth and in reality. Travels With Charley set me off on a trek through the rest of of Steinbeck's oeuvre, ultimately leading to his two great masterpieces, Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden. Both of those books should be in this 'Top Ten', but I've limited myself to just one. 

Robert Pirsig's meditative memoir Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance tells of another road trip, from Minnesota to Northern California. The focus here is on the internal journey rather than the external, but I remember being completely enchanted by the nights Pirsig spent beneath the stars in the western desert. That book led me to Edward Abbey and Desert Solitaire, a collection of personal essays, philosophical musings, and observations of the natural world from the author's time as a ranger in Arches National Park. Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon is yet another road trip narrative, only parts of which take place in 'the West', but again, there is something about movement, itself, which captures a feeling of what so much of Western Literature is about. Blue Highways also introduced me to Black Elk Speaks by John Neihardt, a book that is largely discredited now, but which led me on to Raymond DeMallie's The Sixth Grandfather, which revisits Neihardt's original transcripts from his conversations with the aging Lakota medicine man. All of these belong to the West's literary canon.

In fiction, Larry McMurtry will always be a major presence in any discussion about the West. Lonesome Dove has become a modern classic of that genre and is a book I loved at the time, and still think of fondly. After that, I waited anxiously for each of the other three books in the series to be published. Sadly, though, none of them filled my imagination the way Lonesome Dove did and I drifted away from McMurtry. As a side note, it's interesting that Dove was the first of the quartet to be published (1985), but was the third, chronologically, in the series. It's also interesting that it took another eight years before Streets of Laredo (the fourth book, chronologically) was published, quickly followed by the two precursors to Lonesome Dove: Dead Man's Walk (1995) and Comanche Moon (1997). Larry McMurtry was a prolific writer, and during the span of years when the Lonesome Dove series was published, he published another eight novels and was also involved with half a dozen film and television productions. 

It was around the time when I read Comanche Moon that I discovered Cormac McCarthy and his magnum opus Blood Meridian - and since then, nothing has ever been quite the same. I'm sure there have been entire PhD theses devoted to this particular novel (and indeed, I included a brief discussion of it in mine), so I won't attempt to say anything profound or meaningful about it here, but that book - more than any other - influenced my sense of literary excellence. The great Harold Bloom compares the novel to Moby Dick, and calls it 'the ultimate western' - though the book's indictment of 'the West' is clear. There are no heroic figures in McCarthy's West, nor any endearing Gus McCrae types. It's a dark novel in the extreme, but its use of language is utterly thrilling. I went on to read McCarthy's previous novels, all of which include themes that come to fruition in Blood Meridian, as well as his later books including The Border Trilogy, which moves the western into the middle years of the 20th century, No Country for Old Men and The Road. If you're a fan of the traditional western, you might want to keep walking.

Each of the books I've chosen for my Top Ten Books of the West is very different from the others: some have a certain artistic merit that appeals to me (McCarthy, DeWitt), while others have historical weight (Brown), or something that seems particularly important to say (Kittredge). All have taught me something about 'the West' and something about myself. I've included a few lines from the opening of each to give a sense of the tone.

O Pioneers! (1913), by Willa Cather - One January, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away. A mist of fine snowflakes was curling and eddying about the cluster of low drab buildings huddled on the gray prairie, under a gray sky. The dwelling-houses were set about haphazard on the tough prairie sod; some of them looked as if they had been moved overnight, and others as if they were straying off by themselves, headed straight for the open plain.

East of Eden (1952), by John Steinbeck - The Salinas Valley is in Northern California. It is a long narrow swale between two ranges of mountains, and the Salinas River winds and twists up the center until it falls at last into Monterey Bay.

     I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers. I remember where a toad may live and what time the birds awaken in the summer - and what trees and seasons smelled like - how people looked and walked and smelled even. The memory of odors is very rich.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970), by Dee Brown - From the Introduction: Since the exploratory journey of Lewis and Clark to the Pacific Coast early in the nineteenth century, the number of published accounts describing the "opening" of the American West has risen into the thousands. The greatest concentration of recorded experience and observation came out of the thirty-year span between 1860 and 1890 - the period covered by this book. It was an incredible era of violence, greed, audacity, sentimentality, undirected exuberance, and an almost reverential attitude toward the ideal of personal freedom for those who already had it.

The Death of Jim Loney (1979), by James Welch - Loney watched the muddy boys bang against each other and he thought of a passage from the Bible: "Turn away from man in whose nostrils is breath, for of what account is he?" The boys stood up, some walking back to the huddle, others standing with hands on hips and heads bent. The rain fell, but more lightly now. Beyond the arc lights the world was black. The shiny helmets lined up against each other and crashed again, this time a little farther downfield. A couple of car horns honked. Loney could remember no other passages and he was surprised that he had remembered that one.

Housekeeping (1980), by Marilynne Robinson - My name is Ruth. I grew up with my younger sister, Lucille, under the care of my grandmother, Mrs. Sylvia Foster, and when she died, of her sisters-in-law, Misses Lily and Nona Foster, and when they fled, of her daughter, Mrs Sylvia Fisher. Through all these generations of elders we lived in one house, my grandmother's house, built for her by her husband, Edmund Foster, an employee of the railroad, who escaped this world before I entered it. It was he who put us down in this unlikely place. 

Blood Meridian (1985), by Cormac McCarthy - See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves. His folk are known for hewers of wood and drawers of water but in truth his father has been a schoolmaster. He lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost. The boy crouches by the fire and watches him.

A Thousand Acres (1991), by Jane Smiley - At sixty miles per hour, you could pass our farm in a minute, on County Road 686, which ran due north into the T intersection at Cabot Street Road. Cabot Street Road was really just another country blacktop, except that five miles west it ran into and out of the town of Cabot. On the western edge of Cabot, it became Zebulon County Scenic Highway, and ran for three miles along the curve of the Zebulon River, before the river turned south and the Scenic continued west into Pike. The T intersection of CR 686 perched on a little rise, a rise nearly as imperceptible as the bump in the center of an inexpensive plate.

Hole in the Sky (1992), by William Kittredge - Maybe children wake to a love affair every other morning or so; if given any chance, they seem to like the sight and smell and feel of things so much. Falling for the world could be a thing that happens to them all the time. I hope so, I hope it is purely commonplace. I'm trying to imagine that it is, that our childhood love of things is perfectly justifiable. Think of light and how far it falls, to us. To fall, we say, naming a fundamental way of going to the world - falling.

Reservation Blues (1995), by Sherman Alexie - In the one hundred and eleven years since the creation of the Spokane Indian Reservation in 1881, not one person, Indian or otherwise, had ever arrived there by accident. Wellpinit, the only town on the reservation, did not exist on most maps, so the black stranger surprised the whole tribe when he appeared with nothing more than the suit he wore and the guitar slung over his back. As Simon drove backward into town, he first noticed the black man standing beside the faded WELCOME TO WELLPINIT, POPULATION: VARIABLE sign. Lester FallsApart slept under that sign and dreamed about the stranger before anyone else had a chance.

The Sisters Brothers (2011), by Patrick DeWitt - I was sitting outside the Commodore's mansion, waiting for my bother Charlie to come out with news of the job. It was threatening to snow and I was cold and for want of something to do I studied Charlie's new horse, Nimble. My new horse was called Tub. We did not believe in naming horses but they were given to us as partial payment for the last job with the names intact, so that was that. Our unnamed previous horses had been immolated, so it was not as though we did not need these new ones but I felt we should have been given money to purchase horses of our own choosing, horses without histories and habits and names they expected to be addressed by.