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 on the difficult journey from Missouri to Oregon. In sensitive but unsentimental prose, Guthrie illuminates the harsh trials and resounding triumphs of pioneer life. With THE WAY WEST, he pays homage to the grandeur of the western wilderness, its stark and beautiful scenery, and its extraordinary people.

The cowboy, one of the greatest fictional characters in American literary history, is more than a man or a myth; he is an identity, the soul of a country that started out as the wild and unruly and has risen to the civilized and respected. The Greatest Cowboy Stories Ever Told includes twenty-three exciting stories from a variety of contributors, such as Mark Twain, Karl May, Tom McGuane, Larry McMurtry, Edgar Beecher Bronson, Frederic Remington, Max Brand, and John Graves. The Golden Age of the Cowboy, or what has been called the Kingdom of Cattle, lasted from the close of the Civil War to the turn of the 20th century. Barbed wire and the iron horse put paid to the free range and the long trail drive just as the coming of the law obviated the need for the rough chivalry of the code of the West. Though the days of dueling-every individual was for himself and men were expected to settle their own scores-are over, it is memories of these drastic times and extreme measures and the people who lived them that remain our defining characteristics. This book is filled with some of the most action-filled and exciting stories ever to come out of the American landscape.

Owen Wister's powerful story of the silent stranger who rides into the uncivilized West and defeats the forces of evil embodies one of the most enduring themes in American mythology.

Set in the vast Wyoming territory, The Virginian (1902) captures both the grandeur and the loneliness of the frontier experience, brilliantly evoking the tension between the romantic freedom of the great, untamed landscape and mankind's deep-seated desire for community and social order. Wister brings to life the honesty and rough justice that ruled the range and the civilizing influence of determined women in frontier settlements that imposed a sense of society on an unruly population.

For Wister, the West tested a man's true worth. His hero-influenced by those of Sir Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper-is a man who lives by the classic code of chivalry, ruled by quiet courage and a deeply felt sense of honor.

'If you read only one western in your life, this is the one' Roland Smith, author of Peak He rode into our valley in the summer of 1889, a slim man, dressed in black. 'Call me Shane,' he said. He never told us more. There was a deadly calm in the valley that summer, a slow, climbing tension that seemed to focus on Shane. Seen through the eyes of a young boy, Bob Starrett, SHANE is the classic story of a lone stranger. At first sight, the boy realises there is something unusual about the approaching man, but as Bob gets to know Shane, he realises that there is an inner sadness in him. SHANE is the story of a gunfighter who tries to hang up his gun but is drawn to the side of the boy's family and other homesteaders in their struggle to keep from being forced off their land.

At once a love story and a lush comic masterpiece, Martha Moody is a speculative western which embraces the ordinary and gritty details - as well as the magic - of women's lives in the old west.

This book is a cultural history of the interplay between the Western genre and American gun rights and legal paradigms. From muskets in the hands of landed gentry opposing tyrannical government to hidden pistols kept to ward off potential attackers, the historical development of entwined legal and cultural discourses has sanctified the use of gun violence by private citizens and specified the conditions under which such violence may be legally justified. Gunslinging justice explores how the Western genre has imagined new justifications for gun violence which American law seems ever-eager to adopt. -- .