Given the magnificence of the landscape, the vast distances, and the wide scope of the historical events that occurred there, it is not surprising that setting plays an important role in novels about the American West. Each of these books succeeds brilliantly in evoking a particular place and time:

A. B. Guthrie’s 1947 novel The Big Sky (even better than its sequel, The Way West, which won the Pulitzer Prize), The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark (1940), and Jack Schaefer’s Shane (1949) were all made into well-regarded movies, but these three classics of Western fiction continue to make for wonderful reading.

Larry McMurtry’s trio of novels about Duane Moore and Thalia, Texas, in the last half of the twentieth century—The Last Picture Show; Texasville; and Duane’s Depressed—are bittersweet, frequently funny novels about growing up and growing older in a dusty West Texas town, but it’s his historical novels that have really made his reputation. The series that began with Lonesome Dove, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985 and continued with several sequels and prequels (including Streets of Laredo; Comanche Moon; and Dead Man’s Walk), is considered by many to be the Great American Western Saga.

One of the major pleasures of reading both of James Galvin’s novels, The Meadow and Fencing the Sky (the setting is Colorado in the former and the Wyoming-Colorado border in the latter), is seeing how he writes with care, affection, and poetic detail about place and time. In the one hundred vignettes that comprise The Meadow, Galvin mixes fact and fiction while relating the story of the men and women who lived and worked over a hundred-year period on a mountain. Fencing the Sky explores issues of greed and idealism, friendship and forgiveness. Take a look also at Galvin’s work as a poet, in Resurrection Update: Collected Poems 1975–1997.


Pueblo, Colorado, a corrupt and decaying mining town high in the Rockies, is the setting for Heidi Julavits’s The Mineral Palace, a story of motherhood, a troubled marriage, and the unveiling of long-held secrets.

A failing sheep ranch on the windswept Great Plains seems an odd setting for a tragedy of Greek proportions, but J. Robert Lennon in On the Night Plain pulls it off successfully. This novel is the story of Grant Person, who returns home to the Great Plains after World War II and witnesses the wreckage of his once-thriving family.

And no list of Western fiction would be complete without a doff of the hat to Wallace Stegner, and in particular his magnificent novel Angle of Repose.