Western Americana Book List · 
Western Americana titles sorted by release date (or by book title):
Zane Grey
Romancing the West
By Stephen J. MayOne of the century’s most enduring American writers, Zane Grey left a legacy to our national consciousness that far outstrips the literary contribution of his often predictable plots and recurring themes.…
DeVoto’s West
History, Conservation, and the Public Good
Edited by Edward K. MullerBy Bernard DeVoto
Social commentator and preeminent western historian Bernard DeVoto vigorously defended public lands in the West against commercial interests. By the time of his death in 1955, DeVoto had published criticism, history, and fiction.…
In the Work of Their Hands Is Their Prayer
Cultural Narrative and Redemption on the American Frontiers, 1830-1930
By Joel DaehnkeWestward expansion on the North American continent by European settlers generated a flurry of writings on the frontier experience over the course of a hundred years. Asserting that the dominant ideology of America's Manifest Destiny embodied a tense, often contradictory union of Christian and secular republican views of social progress, In the Work of Their Hands Is Their Prayer investigates the ambivalence of the frontier as it was inscribed with redemptive, historical significance by a host of frontier writers.…
One-Smoke Stories
Edited by Noreen Groover LapeBy Mary Austin
One-Smoke Stories is a collection of folk tales from Native American, Spanish Colonial, mestizo, and European American peoples of the Southwest retold in the enthralling words of one of the bestselling writers of her day, Mary Austin.…
The Apple Falls from the Apple Tree
Stories
By Helen PapanikolasThe title of Helen Papanikolas’ second collection of short stories, The Apple Falls from the Apple Tree, is taken from an old Greek proverb and speaks of the new generation’s struggle with the vestiges of Greek customs.…
Pure Waters
Frank Waters and the Quest for the Cosmic
By Frank WatersEdited by Barbara Waters
The novels and nonfiction work of writer Frank Waters stand as a monument to his genius and to his lifetime quest to plumb the spiritual depths that he found for himself in the landscape and people of his beloved Southwest.…
The Wild Earth’s Nobility
A Novel
By Frank WatersThe Wild Earth's Nobility is the first of Frank Waters's semiautobiographical novels in the Pikes Peak saga. Here, in a frontier town in the shadow of the commanding mountain, the Rogier family settles near an age-old route of migrating Native Americans.…
Below Grass Roots
A Novel
By Frank WatersIn Below Grass Roots, the second book in Frank Waters's Pikes Peak saga, turn-of-the-century Colorado Springs is prospering with the mining boom and a growing tourist industry. Patriarch Joseph Rogier becomes ever more obsessed with the treasures of the towering mountain and tries to enlist his son-in-law Jonathan Cable in his mining schemes.…
The Dust Within the Rock
A Novel
By Frank WatersBased on one of the most significant periods in Frank Waters's own life, Pike's Peak is perhaps the most complete expression of all the archetypal themes he explored in both fiction and nonfiction.…
Word Rides Again
Rereading The Frontier In American Fiction
By J. David StevensWith much recent scholarship polarizing frontier novels into “popular” and “literary” camps, The Word Rides Again challenges the critical orthodoxy that such works have little in common, arguing instead that formulaic Western fictions can subtly (and even subversively) share cultural concerns with more highbrow brethren.…
A Frank Waters Reader
A Southwestern Life in Writing
By Frank WatersEdited by Thomas J. Lyon
Over the course of his life, Frank Waters amassed a body of work that has few equals in the literature of the American West. Because his was a writing that touched every facet of the Western experience, his voice still echoes throughout that region's literary world.…
Maverick Heart
The Further Adventures of Zane Grey
By Stephen J. MayIn 1927, at the peak of his career, Zane Grey bought a three-masted schooner, which he sailed to the Galapagos Islands, later journeying to Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, and Fiji. As colorful as his characters were, so too was their creator.…
The Temptations of Big Bear
A Novel
By Rudy WiebeRudy Wiebe's The Temptations of Big Bear is an epic of the Canadian West. As the buffalo-based food supply vanishes, Big Bear leads his Plains Cree nation across the prairie in search of a means of retaining the way of life quickly being lost—a life his people have lived for thousands of years.…
Stolen Life
The Journey of a Cree Woman
By Rudy Wiebe and Yvonne JohnsonThe award-winning Stolen Life is a remarkable collaborative work between a distinguished novelist and a Cree woman who broke a lifetime of silence to share her story. Imprisoned for murder at the age of twenty-seven, Yvonne Johnson sought out Rudy Wiebe, the chronicler of her ancestor Big Bear, as a means of coming to terms with her self, her past, and the crime that defines her future.…
West of the Border
The Multicultural Literature of the Western American Frontiers
By Noreen Groover LapeExpanding the scope of American borderland and frontier literary scholarship, West of the Border examines the writings of nineteenth- and turn-of-the-century Native, African, Asian, and Anglo American frontier writers.…
The Time of the Little Black Bird
By Helen PapanikolasIn 1906 a young, semiliterate Greek arrived in America with a fewdollars in his pocket and his people's legacy of proverbs, superstitions, and cultural traits to guide him through the dangers and opportunities of a new world.…
Mountain Dialogues
By Frank Waters“Mysticism is peculiar to the mountainbred,” Frank Waters once told an interviewer for Psychology Today. And in Mountain Dialogues, available for the first time in paperback, the mountainbred Waters proves it true.…
Brave Are My People
Indian Heroes Not Forgotten
By Frank WatersPontiac, Sequoyah, Geronimo, Sitting Bull, Chief Joseph, and Chief Seattle. These legendary names are familiar even to the uninitiated in Native American history, yet the life stories of these great spiritual leaders have been largely unknown.…
Frozen in Silver
The Life and Frontier Photography of P. E. Larson
By Ronald T. BaileyIn 1898 men and women from all over the world converged on Alaska. Gold had been discovered. In the Yukon Territory, all winter long eager gold seekers struggled over the mountain passes connecting Canada with the United States.…
Journey through the West
Thomas Rodney's 1803 Journal from Delaware to the Mississippi Territory
By Thomas RodneyEdited by Dwight L. Smith and Ray Swick
In A Journey through the West, Thomas Rodney writes vividly about flea-infested taverns, bad roads, drunken crew members, squatters, Indians sodden berths, food from the wild and treacherous waters.…
Western Americana titles sorted by release date (or by book title):
