The summing up, Summer 2011

Reviewed June 20, 2011

I’m borrowing a phrase from Patti Abbott today to mark the end of my summer. Monday it’s back to work for one last year in the classroom. Charles Gramlich does this kind of summing up, and it’s a measure of his discipline as a writer that he observes such things. I’m following his noteworthy example.

As many know by now, I’ve been working for over a year on what is turning into a two-volume book about early-early western writers. Thus, while moving at a steady pace over the summer of 2011 and taking copious notes, I became immersed in another time (1880-1915).

The list. I’ve also kept company with mostly forgotten writers who, thanks to digital media, have had a second life on the kindle and nook. Since May, I read and will have written up each of the following novels. (By my count, I still have ten to go.)

Henry Wallace Phillips, Red Saunders (1901)
Jackson Gregory, Under Handicap (1914)
Kate and Virgil Boyles, Langford of the Three Bars (1907)
Ralph Connor, The Sky Pilot (1899)
Robert Alexander Wason, Friar Tuck (1912)
William R. Lighton, Uncle Mac’s Nebrasky (1904)
Hamlin Garland, The Moccasin Ranch (1909)
Will Lillibridge, Ben Blair (1905)
Randall Parrish, Bob Hampton of Placer (1906)
Mary Hallock Foote, The Led-Horse Claim (1883)
Charles King, Dunraven Ranch (1890)
Charles King, Two Soldiers (1888)
John H. Whitson, Justin Wingate, Ranchman (1905)
Oscar Micheaux, The Conquest (1913)
George W. Ogden, The Long Fight (1915)
Nat Love, The Life and Adventures of Nat Love (1907)
Owen Wister, Red Men and White (1896)
Owen Wister, Lin McLean (1897)
Frederic Remington, Sundown Leflare (1899)
Frederic Remington, John Ermine of the Yellowstone (1902)
Mary Austin, Isidro (1905)
Roger Pocock, Curly: A Tale of the Arizona Desert (1905)

Reviewed June 6, 2011

Other writers. I’d planned to read a whole lot more recent western and historical fiction. My TBR stack reaches the ceiling. But I kept finding more early-early writers, and so most of the leisure reading got put on hold. I look forward to the day I can thoroughly indulge myself among the many, many later western writers who have contributed and are still contributing to the genre. Here’s what I did get to:

Loren D. Estelman, Roy & Lillie
Max Brand, Best Western Stories, 3
Max Brand, South of Rio Grande (1936)
Charles Gramlich, Killing Trail
Johnny Boggs, Lonely Trumpet
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902)
Axel Brand, The Dead Genius
Edward A. Grainger, Adventures of Cash Laramie and Miles Gideon
H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines (1885)
Gerald So, We Might Have: Poems
Charles Whipple, A Matter of Tea and Other Stories

Reviewed June 14, 2011

Movies. I came up for air about once a week to watch and review a western movie. Most were from the 1950s, a great period of “adult westerns” before the MPAA introduced the rating system, and movies coming out of Hollywood really changed. These were, in no particular order:

Man in the Shadow (1957)
The Naked Spur (1953)
“Doc” (1971)
Broken Lance (1954)
The Man From Laramie (1955)
Springfield Rifle (1952)
Face of a Fugitive (1959)
My Outlaw Brother (1951)
Rio Bravo (1959)
3 Godfathers (1948)
The Missing (2003)
Rancho Notorious (1952)
Pursued (1947)
The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972)
Yellowstone Kelly (1959)
Crossfire Trail (2001)

So I’ll be posting less frequently in the months ahead, doing a slow countdown of those last ten titles. You can be sure I’ll let it be known when they’re done.

Coming up: Old West glossary, no. 18