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 : a novel
Portis, Charles.
Paper Book
True Grit is the basis for two movies, the 1969 classic starring John Wayne and the Academy Award® winning 2010 version starring Jeff Bridges and written and directed by the Coen brothers.   True Grit tells the story of Mattie Ross, who is just fourteen years of age when a coward going by...
All the pretty horses
McCarthy, Cormac
Paper Book
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER * NATIONAL BESTSELLER * The first volume in the Border Trilogy, from the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road All the Pretty Horses is the tale of John Grady Cole, who at sixteen...
Lonesome Dove : a novel
McMurtry, Larry.
Paper Book
A love story and an epic of the frontier, Lonesome Dove is the grandest novel ever written about the last, defiant wilderness of America. Richly authentic, beautifully written, Lonesome Dove is a book to make readers laugh, weep, dream and remember. Now a blockbuster television event.
The quick and the dead
L'Amour, Louis
Paper Book
The Virginian : a horseman of the plains
Wister, Owen
Paper Book
In the thousands of miles of rugged rangeland around Medicine Bow, Wyoming, the only law that rules is the law of the gun. A man has to have an iron jaw and a fast trigger to stay alive. And no one is tougher than the Virginian. A peaceable man by nature, slow to anger and soft-spoken, fair and just...
The Sisters brothers
deWitt, Patrick
Paper Book
SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING JAKE GYLLENHAAL, RIZ AHMED, JOHN C. REILLY, AND JOAQUIN PHOENIX A BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST AND A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Publishers Weekly * Amazon * Hudson Booksellers * Washington Post Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die. The...
No country for old men
McCarthy, Cormac
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
Meyer, Philipp
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 : an Indian history of the American West
Brown, Dee Alexander.
Paper Book
Now a special 30th-anniversary edition in both hardcover and paperback, the classic bestselling historyThe New York Times called "Original, remarkable, and finally heartbreaking...Impossible to put down" Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is Dee Brown's eloquent,...
The big sky : a novel
Guthrie, A. B., Jr.
Paper Book
From Pulitzer Prize-winning author A. B. Guthrie, Jr., The Big Sky is a classic portrait of America's vast frontier that inspired the Western genre in fiction. The Best Novel of the American West as chosen by members of the Western Literature Association ...
The ox-bow incident
Clark, Walter Van Tilburg
Paper Book
Set in 1885, The Ox-Bow Incident is a searing and realistic portrait of frontier life and mob violence in the American West. First published in 1940, it focuses on the lynching of three innocent men and the tragedy that ensues when law and order are abandoned. The result is an emotionally...
Blood meridian, or, The evening redness in the West
McCarthy, Cormac
Paper Book
25th ANNIVERSARY EDITION * From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road: an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the...
Little house on the prairie
Wilder, Laura Ingalls
Paper Book
Revisit one of the most beloved books in Laura Ingalls Wilder's classic Little House series with this gorgeous hardcover, unjacketed edition of Little House on the Prairie, featuring new, iconic cover art, no interior art, and a special foreword. When Laura Ingalls and her family leave...
Riders of the purple sage
Grey, Zane
Paper Book
This splendid, powerful, classic novel was written in 1911, but for over ninety years it has existed only in a profoundly censored version, one that undermined the truth of the characters and the integrity of Zane Grey's masterpiece. In this restored edition, with text based on Grey's original...
Shane
Schaefer, Jack
Paper Book
The gunslinger
King, Stephen
Paper Book
In 1978 Stephen King introduced the world to the last Gunslinger, Roland of Gilead.  Nothing has been the same since. Over twenty years later the quest for the Dark Tower continues to take readers on a wildly epic ride. Through parallel worlds and across time, Roland must brave desolate wastelands...

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