His Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove, first published in 1985, is honored as the best work of fiction in 2021 as both a tribute to his legacy as an author and as a testament to the fact that 35 years after the Pulitzer committee honored Lonesome Dove, it remains the last novel set in the 19th-century West to be awarded the coveted fiction prize. Larry McMurtry was the greatest living Western author when died on March 25, 2021. Just remember, without your support and interest, publishers will continue to marginalize the Old West history genre out of the marketplace entirely. Third, get involved in your local and state historical societies, attend book signings and book fairs and keep buying Western history, biography and fiction. Second, let the university publishers you have supported for years know your displeasure about their lack of nonfiction titles about the 19th-century West. My recommendations about the state of Old West history publishing: first and foremost, keep buying Old West history titles. We shall have to see what Forge has planned in 2022, but Westerns are not even listed as a category on its website. It may be the end of the road for the literary Western novel in New York. One bright new start in Western fiction is TwoDot, while some of the university presses, including Bison Books, also have expanded into Western fiction.īut what about the state of Western fiction publishing in New York, once the center of all great American fiction publishing? I am not sure if even Larry McMurtry or Elmore Leonard could get a contract from a major New York fiction house in 2022. I encourage our readers who love Western fiction to support them as much as possible, because without them, new classic Western titles would more or less be available from just a handful of other presses.
In Western fiction, three companies are responsible for its current vitality in trade, mass market and even in hardcover: Five Star, Kensington/Pinnacle and Wolfpack. This may be the perfect time for an entrepreneur, or a set of small houses based in the West, to combine forces and take a lead in partnership with the Wild West History Association to start a new Western history imprint. I wish I had better news to report on this matter, but the time has come when most major academic houses are publishing fewer than 10 new traditional 19th-century titles a year. The canary in the coal mine of Old West history publishing is the waning number of Old West titles published annually by university publishers. Pearl Hart Image, True West Archives/Joe Boot Image Courtesy John Boessenecker John Boessenecker’s latest book, Wildcat: The Untold Story of Pearl Hart, the Wild West’s Most Notorious Woman Bandit, reveals the true story of Pearl Hart and her stage robbing partner Joe Boot, and how they both ended up in Yuma’s notorious Arizona Territorial Prison. The Western Hangs On While Old West history titles wane, classic Western fiction continues to sell.