Best book line of the day

“The ultimate Western is not Blood Meridian, it’s Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man, and right behind it is Lonesome Dove.

Allen Barra in a review essay, “Cormac McCarthy vs. Larry McMurtry: Best Western Novelist”

The essay is well worth any reader’s time, but the booklist is invaluable too.

The roundup of serious writers who have written Westerns over this span is impressive: E.L. Doctorow’s amusing revisionist take on the pulp Western, Welcome to Hard Times (1960), Thomas Berger’s epic Little Big Man (1964), Charles Portis’s True Grit (1968), which is soon to appear as a Coen Brothers’ film for Christmas release, Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), Ron Hansen’s Desperadoes (1979) and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (1983), Pete Dexter’s elegiac twilight-of-the-gods account of Wild Bill Hickok’s last days, Deadwood (1986), Daniel Woodrell’s Woe to Live On (1987), made into Ang Lee’s film Ride With the Devil, Susan Dodd’s heartrending fictional biography of Jesse James’s mother, Mamaw (1988), N. Scott Momaday’s juxtaposing of the legend of a young Kiowa boy with that of Billy the Kid, The Ancient Child (1989), David Thomson’s witty and original Silver Light (1990), which straddles the lines between fiction, film and history by mingling the destinies of real-life Westerners with film characters, Robert Coover’s phantasmagorical Ghost Town (1998), Philip Kimball’s sweet, sad and savage Liar’s Moon (1999), and, this year, Deep Creek by Dana Hand (pen name of Anne Matthews and Will Howarth), a grim and fascinating fictional account of the actual slaughter of Chinese miners in 1870s Idaho.