Best Westerns

Books, that is. Not the hotel chain. A sampling of the best westerns written.
Updated October 2, 2022
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True Grit
Charles Portis
Paper Book
A #1 New York Times bestseller, Charles Portis's True Grit is "an epic and a legend" (Washington Post), a story of danger and adventure in the Old West--the basis for two award-winning films, the first starring John Wayne in his only Oscar-winning role, as...
Lonesome Dove
Larry McMurtry
Paper Book
The Pulitzer Prize­-winning American classic of the American West that follows two aging Texas Rangers embarking on one last adventure. An epic of the frontier, Lonesome Dove is the grandest novel ever written about the last defiant wilderness of America. Journey to the...
The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains
Owen Wister
Paper Book
The Virginian (1902) is Owen Wister's classic popular romance, and the most significant shaping influence on cowboy fiction. Its narrator, fresh from the East, encounters in Wyoming cattle country a strange, seductive and often violent land where the handsome figure of the Virginian battles for...
No Country for Old Men
Cormac McCarthy
Paper Book
Set in our own time along the bloody frontier between Texas and Mexico, this is Cormac McCarthy’s first novel since Cities of the Plain completed his acclaimed, best-selling Border Trilogy. Llewelyn Moss, hunting antelope near the Rio Grande, instead finds men shot...
The Son
Philipp Meyer
Paper Book
Philipp Meyer, the acclaimed author of American Rust, returns with The Son: an epic of the American West and a multigenerational saga of power, blood, land, and oil that follows the rise of one unforgettable Texas family, from the Comanche raids of the 1800s to the to the oil booms of the 20th...
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
Dee Brown
Paper Book
Now a special 30th-anniversary edition in both hardcover and paperback, the classic bestselling history "The New York Times" called "Original, remarkable, and finally heartbreaking...Impossible to put down" "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" is Dee Brown's eloquent, fully documented account of the...
The Ox-Bow Incident
Walter Van Tilburg Clark
Paper Book
The murder of a cowboy sends a vigilante group on a frenzied hunt to track down the killer
Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy
Paper Book
Riders of the Purple Sage
Zane Grey
Paper Book
A gentile sage-rider is about to be whipped by the Mormans to coerce the rich and beautiful Jane Withersteen to marry against her will. In desperation Jane whispers the prayer, "whence cometh my help!" Just then an unlikely hero, the infamous gunfighter, Lassiter routs the persecutors and is drawn...

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