Ten top books in the history & future of the Western

John Larison is the author of Whiskey When We’re Dry.

At Publishers Weekly he tagged ten books that represent the evolution of the Western, including:

The Son by Philipp Meyer (2012)

Maybe the most ambitious Western since Lonesome Dove, Meyer’s multigenerational saga follows a Texas family from their settlement of the state through the oil boom and to their eventual ascension to the top a global oil empire. The book returns to Proulx-like realism, but to ask urgent questions about contemporary American power, wealth, and the legacy of historic injustice. The sections set when the Comanche still roamed the state will strike some readers as throwbacks to an earlier era of cowboy glamorization, but the insistence on authentic grit and gore make even those scenes feel like new contributions to the literature.

Read about another entry on the list.

Also see Callan Wink's ten best books set in the American West and Clive Sinclair's top ten westerns.

--Marshal Zeringue