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Top 10 Best Westerns : Lonesome Dove, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, Riders of the Purple Sage, The Grapes of Wrath, Shane, The Sisters Brothers, Little Big Man, The Crossing, The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains, Old Yeller

Lonesome Dove
AuthorLarry McMurtry
A love story, an adventure, and an epic of the frontier, Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize— winning classic, Lonesome Dove, the third book in the Lonesome Dove tetralogy, is the grandest novel ever written about the last defiant wilderness of America.

Journey to the dusty little Texas...
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West
AuthorDee Brown
ISBN0805066691
Now a special 30th-anniversary edition in both hardcover and paperback, the classic bestselling history The New York Times called "Original, remarkable, and finally heartbreaking...Impossible to put down."

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is Dee Brown's eloquent, fully documented account...
Riders of the Purple Sage
AuthorZane Grey
ISBN0812966120
Told by a master storyteller who, according to critic Russell Nye, “combined adventure, action, violence, crisis, conflict, sentimentalism, and sex in an extremely shrewd mixture,” Riders of the Purple Sage is a classic of the Western genre. It is the story of Lassiter, a gunslinging avenger...
The Grapes of Wrath
AuthorJohn Steinbeck
The Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression, a book that galvanized—and sometimes outraged—millions of readers.

First published in 1939, Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the...
Shane
AuthorJack Schaefer
ISBN0395941164
A stranger rode out of the heart of the great glowing West, into the small Wyoming valley in the summer of 1889.
It was Shane, who appeared on the horizon and became a friend and guardian to the Starrett family at a time when homesteaders and cattle rangers battled for territory and survival. Jack Schaefer’s...
The Sisters Brothers
AuthorPatrick deWitt
ISBN0062041266
Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die. The enigmatic and powerful man known only as the Commodore has ordered it, and his henchmen, Eli and Charlie Sisters, will make sure of it. Though Eli doesn't share his brother's appetite for whiskey and killing, he's never known anything else. But their prey isn't...
Little Big Man
AuthorThomas Berger
ISBN1860466419
"I am a white man and never forget it, but I was brought up by the Cheyenne Indians from the age of ten."

So starts the story of Jack Crabb, the 111-year old narrator of Thomas Berger's masterpiece of American fiction. As a "human being", as the Cheyenne called their own, he won the name Little Big...
The Crossing
AuthorCormac McCarthy
ISBN0394574753
Following All the Pretty Horses in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy is a novel whose force of language is matched only by its breadth of experience and depth of thought. In the bootheel of New Mexico hard on the frontier, Billy and Boyd Parham are just boys in the years before the Second World War, but on...
The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains
AuthorOwen Wister
ISBN0743238028
In the untamed West, pioneers came to test their fortunes -- and their wills. The Wyoming territory was a harsh, unforgiving land, with its own unwritten code of honor by which men lived and died. Into this rough landscape rides the Virginian, a solitary man whose unbending will is his only guide through...
Old Yeller
AuthorFred Gipson
ISBN0060935472
At first, Travis couldn't stand the sight of Old Yeller.

The stray dog was ugly, and a thieving rascal, too. But he sure was clever, and a smart dog could be a big help on the wild Texas frontier, especially with Papa away on a long cattle drive up to Abilene.

Strong and courageous, Old Yeller...
Butcher's Crossing
AuthorJohn Williams
ISBN1590171985
In his National Book Award–winning novel Augustus, John Williams uncovered the secrets of ancient Rome. With Butcher’s Crossing, his fiercely intelligent, beautifully written western, Williams dismantles the myths of modern America.

It is the 1870s, and Will Andrews, fired up...
The Ox-Bow Incident
AuthorWalter Van Tilburg Clark
ISBN0812972589
Set in 1885, The Ox-Bow Incident is a searing and realistic portrait of frontier life and mob violence in the American West. First published in 1940, it focuses on the lynching of three innocent men and the tragedy that ensues when law and order are abandoned. The result is an emotionally powerful, vivid,...
Angle of Repose
AuthorWallace Stegner
ISBN0140169300
Wallace Stegner's Pultizer Prize-winning novel is a story of discovery—personal, historical, and geographical. Confined to a wheelchair, retired historian Lyman Ward sets out to write his grandparents' remarkable story, chronicling their days spent carving civilization into the surface...
My Ántonia
AuthorWilla Cather
ISBN1583485090
Through Jim Burden's endearing, smitten voice, we revisit the remarkable vicissitudes of immigrant life in the Nebraska heartland, with all its insistent bonds. Guiding the way are some of literature's most beguiling characters: the Russian brothers plagued by memories of a fateful sleigh ride,...
Brokeback Mountain
AuthorAnnie Proulx
ISBN0743271327
Annie Proulx has written some of the most original and brilliant short stories in contemporary literature, and for many readers and reviewers, "Brokeback Mountain" is her masterpiece. Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, two ranch hands, come together when they're working as sheepherder and camp tender...
Cities of the Plain
AuthorCormac McCarthy
ISBN0679747192
The concluding volume of the Border trilogy. In this magnificent new novel, the National Book Award-winning author of All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing fashions a darkly beautiful elegy for the American frontier. It is 1952 and John Grady Cole and Billy Parham are working as ranch hands in New Mexico,...
Dead Man's Walk
AuthorLarry McMurtry
ISBN0684857545
Dead Man's Walk is the first, extraordinary book in the epic Lonesome Dove tetralogy, in which Larry McMurtry breathed new life into the vanished American West and created two of the most memorable heroes in contemporary fiction: Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call.

As young Texas Rangers,...
O Pioneers!
AuthorWilla Cather
ISBN0679743626
O Pioneers! (1913) was Willa Cather's first great novel, and to many it remains her unchallenged masterpiece. No other work of fiction so faithfully conveys both the sharp physical realities and the mythic sweep of the transformation of the American frontier—and the transformation of the people...
Death Comes for the Archbishop
AuthorWilla Cather
ISBN0679728899
There is something epic—and almost mythic—about this sparsely beautiful novel by Willa Cather, although the story it tells is that of a single human life, lived simply in the silence of the desert. In 1851 Father Jean Marie Latour comes as the Apostolic Vicar to New Mexico. What he finds is a vast...
The Searchers
AuthorAlan LeMay
ISBN0515092290
”A man has to learn to forgive himself,” Amos said, his voice unnaturally gentle….”Or he can’t stand to live. It so happens we be Texans. We took a reachin’ holt, way far out, past where any man has right or reason to hold on. Or it we didn’t, our folks did, so we can’t leave off, without giving...
The Way West
AuthorA.B. Guthrie Jr.
ISBN0618154620
An enormously entertaining classic, THE WAY WEST brings to life the adventure of the western passage and the pioneer spirit. The sequel to THE BIG SKY, this celebrated novel charts a frontiersman's return to the untamed West in 1846. Dick Summers, as pilot of a wagon train, guides a group of settlers...
Dances with Wolves
AuthorMichael Blake
ISBN0449000753

Dances With Wolves film poster.

I HAD watched Kevin Costner’s Dances With Wolves in the late ’90s and had loved it. I finally got to read Michael Blake’s novel a few days back and loved it as much. By the way, it is the first Western that I have read after the early seventies when as a schoolboy...
The Whip
AuthorKaren Kondazian
ISBN1601823029
The Whip is inspired by the true story of a woman, Charlotte "Charley" Parkhurst (1812-1879) who lived most of her extraordinary life as a man in the old west.

As a young woman in Rhode Island, she fell in love with a runaway slave and had his child. The destruction of her family drove her west to...
Doc
AuthorMary Doria Russell
ISBN1400068045
Born to the life of a Southern gentleman, Dr. John Henry Holliday arrives on the Texas frontier hoping that the dry air and sunshine of the West will restore him to health. Soon, with few job prospects, Doc Holliday is gambling professionally with his partner, Mária Katarina Harony, a high-strung,...
The Time It Never Rained
AuthorElmer Kelton
ISBN0812574516
To the ranchers and farmers of 1950s Texas, man's biggest enemy is one he can't control. With their entire livelihood pegged on the chance of a wet year or a dry year, drought has the ability to crush their whole enterprise, to determine who stands and who falls, and to take food out of the mouths of the workers...
The Blessing Way
AuthorTony Hillerman
ISBN0061000019
Alternate cover edition can be found here.

Homicide is always an abomination, but there is something exceptionally disturbing about the victim discovered in a high lonely place, a corpse with a mouth full of sand, abandoned at a crime scene seemingly devoid of tracks or useful clues. Though...
Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West
AuthorHampton Sides
ISBN0385507771
A Magnificent History of How the West Was Really Won—a Sweeping Tale of Shame and Glory

In the fall of 1846 the venerable Navajo warrior Narbona, greatest of his people’s chieftains, looked down upon the small town of Santa Fe, the stronghold of the Mexican settlers he had been fighting...
Close Range
AuthorAnnie Proulx
ISBN0684852225
Short-story collection from the Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling author of The Shipping News and Accordion Crimes.

Annie Proulx's masterful language and fierce love of Wyoming are evident in these tales of loneliness, quick violence, and the wrong kinds of love. Each of the portraits...
Warlock
AuthorOakley Hall
ISBN1590171616
Oakley Hall's legendary Warlock revisits and reworks the traditional conventions of the Western to present a raw, funny, hypnotic, ultimately devastating picture of American unreality. First published in the 1950s, at the height of the McCarthy era, Warlock is not only one of the most original and...
A River Runs Through it and Other Stories
AuthorNorman Maclean
ISBN0226500667
Just as Norman Maclean writes at the end of "A River Runs through It" that he is "haunted by waters," so have readers been haunted by his novella. A retired English professor who began writing fiction at the age of 70, Maclean produced what is now recognized as one of the classic American stories of the twentieth...
Resolution
AuthorRobert B. Parker
The New York Times–bestselling author’s richly imagined work of historical fiction: a powerful tale of the Old West from the acknowledged master of crime fiction.

I had an eight-gauge shotgun that I’d taken with me when I left Wells Fargo. It didn’t take too long for things to develop....
By the Shores of Silver Lake
AuthorLaura Ingalls Wilder
ISBN0060885416
The adventures of Laura Ingalls and her family continue as they move from their little house on the banks of Plum Creek to the wilderness of the unsettled Dakota Territory. Here Pa works on the new railroad until he finds a homestead claim that is perfect for their new little house. Laura takes her first...
Monte Walsh
AuthorJack Schaefer
ISBN0803291213
Monte Walsh has never met a horse he couldn’t ride, and Chet Rollins has never met one he couldn’t rope. For a decade they are unbeatable and inseparable, working as trail hands throughout the West until finally settling with Cal Brennan’s Slash Y. Their rough cowboy ethics see them through...
The Shootist
AuthorGlendon Swarthout
ISBN0803238231
By the author of The Homesman, now a major motion picture The Shootist is John Bernard Books, a gunfighter at the turn of the twentieth century who must confront the greatest Shootist of all: Death. Most men would end their days in bed or take their own lives, but a gunfighter has a third option, one that...
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: Screenplay
AuthorWilliam Goldman
ISBN0552082627
This screenplay sold for the then unheard of price of $400,000 back in 1967 or so. I have seen the movie, but never read it through before now, and I can see why it was such a hot property. First of all, the story is very suspenseful, and the characters are likeable and fun to spend some time with. Going a little...
Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation
AuthorJohn Ehle
ISBN0385239548
One of the many ironies of U.S. government policy toward Indians in the early 1800s is that it persisted in removing to the West those who had most successfully adapted to European values. As whites encroached on Cherokee land, many Native leaders responded by educating their children, learning English,...
The Lonesome Gods
AuthorLouis L'Amour
ISBN0553275186
“I am Johannes Verne, and I am not afraid.”
 
This was the boy’s mantra as he plodded through the desert alone, left to die by his vengeful grandfather. Johannes Verne was soon to be rescued by outlaws, but no one could save him from the lasting memory of his grandfather’s eyes, full of...
Love Medicine
AuthorLouise Erdrich
ISBN0060786469
A member of the Chippewa and Obijwe tribes, Louise Erdrich has been a leading voice in Native American literature for over thirty years. Determined to publish her first book before she turned thirty, Erdrich wrote Love Medicine at the age of twenty nine, and this debut novel won the National Critics...
On the Banks of Plum Creek
AuthorLaura Ingalls Wilder
ISBN0060885408
The adventures of Laura Ingalls and her family continue as they leave their little house on the prairie and travel in their covered wagon to Minnesota. They settle into a house made of sod on the banks of beautiful Plum Creek. Soon Pa builds them a sturdier house, with real glass windows and a hinged door....
Little Town on the Prairie
AuthorLaura Ingalls Wilder
ISBN0060885432
About two years ago I started rereading the Little House books. It started as a whim after visiting Minnesota and driving by one of the places where Laura Ingalls used to live. I had read these books with my mother when I was a child, and I grew up with the popular TV show based on the series, so there was a hefty...
The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters
AuthorRobert Lewis Taylor
ISBN0385422229
Dr. Sardius McPheeters, is a dreamer always chasing the elusive beautiful rainbow, but never quite fully grasping it in his hands, the gambler and imbiber of strong drinks, is a capable physician in Louisville, Kentucky, his family suffers though, but his creditors want their money...The time, during...
Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West
AuthorWallace Stegner
ISBN0140159940
John Wesley Powell fought in the Civil War and it cost him an arm. But it didn't stop him from exploring the American West. Here Wallace Stegner, a Pulitzer Prize-winner, gives us a thrilling account of Powell's struggle against western geography and Washington politics. We witness the successes and...
A Thief of Time
AuthorTony Hillerman
ISBN0061000043
Visiting Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee in the pages of a Hillerman mystery is the next best thing to sleeping under the stars in Navajo country, wondering if there is magic in the sky above.

A Thief of Time has atmosphere to spare, and a complex plot. Leaphorn and Chee are also fleshed out more than usual...
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