A Western Sense of Place

Since I’ve been doing the Southern Reading Challenge at Maggie Reads, and thinking about “sense of place” in Southern literature, it’s made me think about the literature of the place I was born, grew up in, and still live: the American West. I think Western literature is a wonderful and very wide genre, and it probably deserves its own challenge. But I’m not up to hosting a challenge (technologically or time-wise), so I thought I would just post a list of some of my favorite western books, and maybe inspire someone to read something western that they haven’t read before. (Or inspire someone else to host a western challenge!)

Some of the books on this list could also be defined as “frontier literature”. And of course the west is physically huge and diverse, so sometimes the best Western literature is set in cities, or on the shore of the Pacific. Also, I had to include some memoirs, because they really moved me, or really depicted something about the west that no one else has. Here’s my list:

• Close Range: Wyoming Stories by Annie Proulx
• That Old Ace in the Hole by Annie Proulx
• Anything by Wallace Stegner, but especially:
• Angle of Repose
• Big Rock Candy Mountain
• White Fang by Jack London
• Call of the Wild by Jack London
• Cowboys Are My Weakness by Pam Houston
• The Big Sky by A.B. Guthrie
• My Antonia by Willa Cather
• O Pioneers by Willa Cather
• The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather
• Shane by Jack Schaefer
• Giants in the Earth by O.E. Rolvaag
• Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
• Ramona by Helen Hunt Jackson
• Ask the Dust by John Fante
• Brotherhood of the Grape by John Fante
• Pulp by Charles Bukowski (and almost anything else he wrote)
• Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson
• Roughing It by Mark Twain
• “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” a short story by Mark Twain
• Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
• Little Big Man by Thomas Berger
• The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
• Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
• The Milagro Beanfield War by John Nichols
• Valdez is Coming by Elmore Leonard
• The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan (okay, mainly set in China, but also in the Bay Area)
• Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston
• The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston
• Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion
• Slouching Toward Bethlehem by Joan Didion
• The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West
• A River Runs Through It by Norman MacLean
• Anything by Jim Harrison, including:
• Dalva
• Legends of the Fall
• Sundog
• Anything by Raymond Carver, including:
• Where I’m Calling From
• Short Cuts
• What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
• Vineland by Thomas Pynchon
• Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey
• The Mountains of California by John Muir
• The Player by Michael Tolkin
• House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III
• Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell
• Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown
• Across the High Lonesome by James McNay Brumfield
• Aquaboogie by Susan Straight
• Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights by Susan Straight
• Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin
• Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley
• L.A. Confidential by James Ellroy
• The Onion Field by Joseph Wambaugh
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter Thompson
• Bad Lands by Oakley Hall
• Giant Joshua by Maureen Whipple
• Rest of the Earth by William H. Henderson
• True Grit by Charles Portis
• The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Left-Handed Poems by Michael Ondaatje
• Desperadoes by Ron Hansen
• The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford by Ron Hansen
• The Ancient Child by M. Scott Momaday
• Ghost Town by Robert Coover
• Deadwood by Pete Dexter
• Woe to Live On by Daniel Woodrell
• Mamaw by Susan Dodd
• Liar’s Moon by Philip Kimball
• Bucking the Tiger by Bruce Olds
• Welcome to Hard Times by E.L. Doctorow
• Silver Light by David Thomson
• The Sea of Grass by Conrad Richter
• Generation X by Douglas Coupland
• The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
• White Oleander by Janet Fitch
• Anything by Louis L’Amour
• Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place by Terry Tempest Williams
• Anything by Ivan Doig, including
• This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind
• The Whistling Season
  

Whew! I’d welcome any additions to the list, so please tell me about your favorite western books and I’ll add them.

photo of the Monument Valley courtesy of PDPhoto.org