Monthly Archives: September 2025

09.30.25
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Writers

Who is a writer? 

What is a writer? 

How does a writer come to be?

Does a writer spring full-bodied from the brow of Zeus, like Athena? Does a writer rise painfully from the sawdust of the arena floor, like Eric Hoffer? 

Are writers born, or made?

These things have been on my mind lately, perhaps because the Fall Conference of the Wisconsin Writers Association is about to convene in Stevens Point. I am on the program, offering a workshop modestly titled “A Bulletproof Beginning: Five Ways to Anchor Your Story in Urgency from Page One.”  I sure hope I know what I’m talking about.

But who are these people I’ll be meeting with? Folks a lot like me, only as different as different can be. You see, we all have our separate concerns and urgencies. 

I write about Norwegians, Greg Renz writes about firefighters, Bob Allen writes about fish, and Deb Farris writes about the promptings of the Spirit in the workings of her life.

So you see, we are all the same.

All I know is, writers write. 

Louisa May Alcott, the real-life model for Jo March. Public Domain.

We are those who write because we cannot not write.

Some, like Jo March and John-Boy Walton, scribble in notebooks from early childhood and sell their first work as teenagers. Others rumble quietly like dormant volcanoes, then erupt without warning in middle age. 

John-Boy with pen in hand. Public Domain.

My friend Greg Renz waited till retirement to novelize the experiences he had been processing over twenty-eight years as a Milwaukee firefighter. In those years, he told some of his stories informally on more than one occasion. 

I doubt anybody becomes a writer without a prelude of some kind. What warming-up exercises did Homer go through before composing twenty-seven thousand lines of dactyllic hexameter known as the Iliad and the Odyssey?

A Writer’s Odyssey

I, Your New Favorite Writer, set off on the yellow brick road of Literary Lionhood at age seventy. Notions long marinated in quaint bottles on the dusty shelves of my psyche spilled forth in written words, abruptly made manifest to all the world.

Like Jo, John-Boy, Homer, and Greg, I did not come to this calling completely cold. There was a detective story at the age of eight; a comic strip starring me as a cowboy, complete with sidekick, fighting bad guys; a seventh-grade essay on traffic safety, which won me a $25 savings bond—the first time I was paid for writing; plus news stories and feature articles for my high school paper.

In college, I became a radio thing. In the Air Force, I listened in on Chairman Mao’s flyboys and wrote down what they said—sometimes, even, wrote down what they meant to say.

Back in civilian life, after years of muddled career launches, I managed to burrow into the Wisconsin Department of Military Affairs. This is the agency that oversees the state’s National Guard and its Emergency Management division. There, I served the adjutant general as a photographer, writer, and editor. 

When it came time to retire—and I was all for retirement—I still wanted to write. Some guys settle down to a life of golf or fishing or public service. I settled down to a last desperate effort to say what was on my mind.

I realized the truths I wanted to tell could best be told by fiction. Some say truth is stranger than fiction, but I think truth is the subject matter of fiction. There is no point in making up a story if it does not express what’s at the heart of the human experience. 

I found out it’s not all that easy. I’m still working on it. 

I’ve been working on it full time for almost ten years now. In that time, what have I learned?

  • I have learned you are more likely to be struck by lightning than to make any real money as a novelist. John Steinbeck said, “The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.” This seems a considerable understatement.
  • I have learned the Protagonist must protag.
  • I have learned that no matter what it is you ought to be writing, what you will write is what you are damned well determined to write, and that’s all there is to it.

Along the way, I have assembled enough words in a sufficiently plausible order to get two novels published—with the backing of actual, professional publishers—and am well along on the initial assemblage of words for a third. 

These marvels of modern literary science to not fly off the shelves and into the cash register of their own accord. Oh, no, Dear Reader: Each copy must be individually sold by the author in the flesh, at a bookstore or an arts and crafts fair. A few people might purchase them on the Internet, but those people are exceptions.

Go on, be an exception: Buy my books. 

But whether you buy them or not, rest assured I will go on writing them. 

I just can’t help myself.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

09.23.25
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Way Out West, Part V

Here, after undue delays, is the capstone to my series about the Wild West—cowboys mostly imaginary, conjured up in the twentieth century to provide idealized heroes from the nineteenth. 

Wyatt Earp at age 39, c. 1887. Public Domain.

Unlike the fictional cowboys I followed as a child, Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson were real, historical figures. They were authentic Western lawmen. The most cursory reading of their eventful lives will show that their fame was deserved. 

Also unlike the fictional cowboys, Earp and Masterson did not cease to exist after the 1870s and 1880s. Both men lived well into the twentieth century, into the era of automobiles and radio and motion pictures. Each, in the new century, tried to package his own image. 

Though very different men, they had some things in common. Both were born east of the Mississippi in the years before the Civil War. Too young to become soldiers—though Wyatt tried unsuccessfully to enlist at age thirteen—they were drawn, by circumstance or interest, into the great American West in the years after the Civil War. 

Bat Masterson age 26, 1879. Photo by Robert Marr Wright, Public Domain.

Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson were rough, complicated men with checkered careers. They gambled, operated on both sides of the law, and pursued affairs or common-law marriages with multiple women. 

They also excelled at law enforcement in the wildest towns of the frontier—places like Dodge City, Deadwood, and Tombstone. Each man took part in numerous gunfights and showed himself cool and resourceful under fire. Their lives were hodgepodges of romance, self-interest, irresponsibility, responsibility, and violence. 

Bat Masterson (standing) and Wyatt Earp, Dodge City lawmen, 1876. Bat’s hand rests on the butt of his six gun, holstered for cross draw. Courtesy Jack DeMaattos collection. Public Domain.

Earp and Masterson were friends from their time serving together as Dodge City lawmen. They liked and respected each other.

It was remarkable they came through all their adventures unscathed. Masterson did walk with a cane, the result of a pelvic wound in his first gunfight.

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, both men drifted into other pursuits—not instead of, but at first in addition to, law enforcement. After the famous 1881 gunfight at O.K. Corral and a flurry of retaliatory raids that followed it, Wyatt met up with Bat Masterson at Albuquerque and both men repaired to Trinidad, Colorado. There, Masterson became, first, a faro dealer in a saloon and later, the town marshal. 

Earp soon left Trindad for other challenges. Over the next quarter-century, the footloose Wyatt roamed the west, with his third and final wife Josephine “Sadie” Marcus, blazing his way through law enforcement jobs, saloon ownerships, gambling and sporting interests—he refereed the Fitzsimmons-Sharkey heavyweight championship fight in San Francisco in 1896—and mining ventures, including a flyer in the Klondike gold rush of 1898. 

In 1911, when Earp was 63, he and Josephine began living in Los Angeles part-time while also working a mine in the California desert. They continued that pattern of life until his death eighteen years later.

Since he spent time in L.A., Wyatt befriended actors and directors in the nascent Hollywood film industry, serving as an unpaid consultant on several Western films. He became close friends with cowboy actors William S. Hart and Tom Mix and with director John Ford. He exercised a formative influence on the young John Wayne, who met him at Mix’s ranch and by his own admission copied Earp’s walk, talk, and style. 

Wyatt wanted his story told on the silver screen. “If the story were exploited on the screen by you,” he wrote to William S. Hart, “it would do much toward setting me right before a public which has always been fed lies about me.” In 1925 he began working with a friend, mining engineer John Flood, on a biography. Unfortunately, Flood was a poor writer, and the project went nowhere. 

Hugh O’Brian as Wyatt Earp, 1959. Public Domain.

At the time of his death in 1929, Wyatt Earp’s public reputation was smudgy, due partly to his ambiguous role in the gunfight at O.K. Corral and partly to a public perception that as referee in the Fitzsimmons-Sharkey fight, he had thrown the fight to Sharkey by an improper ruling. Only in 1931, with the publication of Stuart N. Lake’s extremely flattering biography Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal, did Earp’s reputation begin to soar. Josephine, by hiding unsavory details about his life, played a part in this redemption.

In 1955, 26 years after his death, Wyatt Earp received the distinction of having his own television show, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, starring Hugh O’Brian. According to the show’s theme song, sung by the Ken Darby Singers:

Well, he cleaned up the country,
The old Wild West country.
He made law and order prevail.
And none can deny it,
The legend of Wyatt
Forever will live on the trail.
Oh, Wyatt Earp! Wyatt Earp—brave, courageous, and bold—
Long live his fame, and long live his glory,
And long may his story be told.

IMDB lists fifteen feature-length films about Wyatt Earp, ten of them made since the debut of the TV show, the other five earlier—but none made before the 1931 Lake biography Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshall.

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Then, what of Bat Masterson? 

Bat spent the 1880s and 1890s dabbling in law enforcement, journalism, dalliance with married women, and the world of prizefighting—not as a fighter but as a second, a timekeeper, and a friend of fighters and promoters. 

Eventually, in 1902, he moved to New York City with his wife, Emma. 

The day after his arrival, Bat was in trouble, scooped up by New York police who took him for an accomplice of a man they were arresting for bunco. He got the charge dropped but had to pay a ten-dollar fine because of the concealed weapon he was carrying.

A friend got Bat a job as a columnist for the New York Morning Telegraph. His column, “Masterson’s Views on Timely topics,” appeared three times a week from 1903 till his death in 1921. It concerned boxing and other sports-related topics. 

Gene Barry plays Bat Masterson on TV, 1958. Public Domain.

Alfred Henry Lewis, the friend who had gotten him the job, also published a fictionalized biography of Bat called The Sunset Trail. He encouraged Bat to write sketches about his adventures, which Lewis published in Human Life magazine. In the same magazine, Masterson provided biogaphical studies of several famed gunfighters, men he had known—Ben Thompson, Wyatt Earp, Luke Short, Doc Holliday, and Bill Tilghman. Other, similar articles were to follow, but Masterson apparently tired of the exercise, and Lewis wrapped up the series with his own article, “The King of the Gun-players: William Barclay Masterson.”

Lewis introduced Bat to President Theodore Roosevelt, who took an immediate liking to him. TR got him appointed deputy U.S. Marshal for the Southern District of New York, with a respectable $2,000 annual salary (equivalent to about $70,000 today). He admonished the former frontier roughneck: “You must be careful not to gamble or do anything while a public officer which might afford opportunity to your enemies and my critics to say that your appointment was improper. I wish you to show this letter to Alfred Henry Lewis and go over the matter with him.” The president was on guard against Masterson’s known propensity to go off the rails. Bat kept the deputy marshal’s job until 1909, when Roosevelt’s successor, William Howard Taft, relieved him of that responsibility.

Bat continued writing his boxing column in the Telegraph. He was prominent in the crowd at the Johnson-Willard fight in Havana, Cuba, in 1915, serving as timekeeper or possibly as one of Jess Willard’s seconds. 

Bat Masterson circa 1911 in New York City. Public Domain.

He died of a heart attack in 1921, at age 67, while sitting at his desk working on his column for the Telegraph. About five hundred people attended his funeral. Attendees included writer Damon Runyon, a friend, who delivered the following eulogy: “He was a 100 percent, 22-karat real man. Bat was a good hater and a wonderful friend. He was always stretching out his hand to some down-and-outer. He had a great sense of humor and a marvelous fund of reminiscence, and was one of the most entertaining companions we have ever known. There are only too few men in the world like Bat Masterson and his death is a genuine loss.” 

The epitaph on his tombstone at Woodlawn Cemetery in New York City says, “Loved by Everyone.”

Eleven years after Bat’s death, Damon Runyon published a collection of his distinctive New York influenced short stories under the title Guys and Dolls. The stories were later adapted into a hit Broadway musical by Frank Loesser, Jo Swerling, and Abe Burrows.  The central character of the stories, and of the musical, was a high-rolling gambler from Colorado named “Sky Masterson.” 

And now you know, as Paul Harvey used to say, the rest of the story.

Next Week: Something Completely Different.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

09.16.25
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Who Can Give Us Meaning?

Dear Reader: My apologies for postponing “Way Out West, Part V” for the second week in a row. It’s just that something came up. Next week, back to what passes for normal around here.

Charlie Kirk and former President of the United States Donald Trump speaking with attendees at the 2023 Turning Point Action Conference at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida. 15 July 2023. Photo by Gage Skidmore, licensed under CC-BY-SA-2.0.

I came home from an appointment Wednesday afternoon, and my wife asked from the kitchen if I’d heard somebody had been shot—I didn’t quite catch the name.

“Who?”

“Charlie Kirk,” she said. “It’s been on TV.”

“Oh. Charlie Kirk was shot. I’m very sorry to hear that. Who is Charlie Kirk?”

She pointed toward the livingroom, where the television spewed forth the stew of messy details and somber speculation that it always serves up at times like these. It announced in due course that Mr. Kirk had died from the single bullet he received in his throat. 

It turns out Charlie Kirk was a conservative political activist, a debater in the political arena, a Trump acolyte, the organizer and head of a huge student movement called Turning Point USA—in all, a Very Big Deal. 

I suppose that’s why people, adrift in the rip currents of our era, have been treating his death as a Very Big Deal. The airwaves abound with post-mortem speculations and virtue-freighted  posturings. The social media, too. 

Charlie Kirk’s fans certainly knew who he was. His critics likewise were very much aware of him. Perhaps I was the only person in America to whom he was not a household name, but then, I’m often accused of not paying attention. It’s really just that I pay attention to other things.

My wife pointed out to me that Kirk’s death cannot be dismissed as unremarkable, having played out amid a crowd of thousands. Kirk was killed at a political event while delivering a political message. The assassin meant the slaying as a political statement.

Before the echoes of the gunshot faded, all sorts of people, speaking or writing in public media, began testifying that the central meaning of this event is political.

Some say, “A man speaking his mind peacefully has been silenced. This is a threat to our First Amendment right of free speech.”

Some say, “His views were reprehensible. He deserved what he got.”

Some say, “When will we learn? We must re-establish civility in our public life.”

Some, like the governor of Utah, see this moment as a possible inflection point—an opportunity to change course as our nation struggles with divisive ideologies. 

All these diverse voices place the problem and the solution in the realm of politics.

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I think it goes deeper.

A man took a high-velocity bullet in his throat. His lifeblood poured out and his life was ended. His wife was widowed, his children left fatherless. The act was done by a man in the grip of powerful emotions he could not, or did not, control. His rage was murderous; he took it out in violence. 

The ancient human drama of killer and killed is the primary meaning of this event. The beliefs and polemical effectiveness of the victim, the beliefs and operational effectiveness of the assassin, are secondary. 

Our dogged insistence that the main meaning is political keeps us from seeing the real problem.

It leads our spokespeople to say fatuous things time and again, things that we know are not true, are meant only to assuage our sense of hopelessness. “We’ve got to understand the killer’s motive, so we can make sure nothing like this ever happens again.” 

Really? How has that been working out?

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We in our oh-so-enlightened society are loath to admit the flawed nature of human beings. It used to be called Original Sin, back when we believed in sin. But to believe in sin, you have to believe in God, for sin is a crime not only against one’s fellow man but against God. And we have no room for God.

Instead, we assume we are naturally good, or at least neutral, beings. We do evil only because we are influenced by a negative environment. If only We—that is, Society—learned how to take the right approach, We could eliminate crime and violence. We need to educate people better. 

  • If only Charlie Kirk had embraced a more enlightened political viewpoint, he would not have invited his own destruction.
  • If only the shooter had understood the First Amendment, he would not have sought to win his argument through violence.
  • If only we all took lessons in tact and diplomacy, this kind of existential conflict would be avoided.

What a mighty opinion we have of our human powers! 

If any of us are grown-ups, we should know by now that none of these things are true; that our powers and our understanding are limited; that even our internal will to do good is apt to falter in the face of felt needs and fears.

Think of all the people you know. Surely you know someone who embodies, in one person, both saint and sinner: the best kind of person and the worst kind of person, inseparable and unaware. 

Not many of us are prepared to take the thought further and examine ourselves for signs of this saint/sinner dichotomy. Maybe we’re afraid of what we’d find. 

My point is, we are mixed beings, both good and evil in one sweet package. Education will take us only so far. We need firm guidelines, if only to protect society. And because even those boundaries will never completely rein in our waywardness, we also need forgiveness.

There is a Stoic in me who says, “Do not expect much of people. We are weak reeds, unreliable stanchions. When people deliver goodness, be agreeably surprised. When they deliver badness, do not condemn but look to yourself and straighten out your own inner being.”

There is also a Christian in me who says, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me. I am only human.”

What Society needs is not some miraculous, altogether unattainable, political accommodation. People have been wrangling over divergent interests since the dawn of history. We haven’t got it all worked out yet, and we never will. 

What Society needs is humility. We need, for starters, the simple recognition that Man is not perfectible. We need some firm guidelines enforced socially, and we need a spiritual basis for hope. 

For me, it’s enough to trust that God has the answers, which must remain to me mysterious. I can live with that, but then I’m old.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

09.09.25
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The Units

Dear Reader: Last week I promised you the final part of my 5-part series on the Old West. I am afraid I will have to ask you to be patient for another week. In the meantime, I hope you’ll enjoy this look back at some of the earliest memories of an old man. This post was originally published November 5, 2019.

Daddy’s friend Clark drove standing up. That’s the first thing I noticed. “That’s how milk trucks are,” he explained. “You have to drive standing up.” I was still amazed at this when we arrived at the circus. 

A three-ring circus, Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Combined Shows. Public Domain image from State Archives of Florida, published under Creative Commons Public Domain Mark 1.0 license.

There in the gathering darkness: a big tent on a dusty lot. We sat high up and saw people called “acrobats” fly through the air and drop into a big, bouncy net. And there came a little car that drove around the three circus rings and dropped off clowns, one by one—at least a dozen of them. The little truck, by some magic, seemed to to have an inexhaustible supply of clowns. 

A milk truck. You had to stand up. “DSC_5874” by improbcat is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0 .

Clark drove the milk truck but did not own it. He was not a regular milkman. He was a college student like Daddy. He drove an early morning milk route for extra cash and could use the truck in off hours.

It was 1949; I was four. We lived in The Units—three or four rows of jerry-built shacks on the campus of Knox College. Each unit, one of three connected side by side, had a kitchen, a bath, a small livingroom, and two small bedrooms. Each unit housed a mommy, a daddy, and one or two very young children.

The occupants were families of war veterans attending college on the newly-enacted GI Bill. We moved in when I was three months old, in September 1945, and left in June 1949, not long after Daddy took me to the circus. 

Special Bond

The families who lived in The Units shared a special bond and a certain kind of outlook. The men were college students, the women housewives. They were all, on average, four or more years older than the typical entering freshman. They were householders, married, with young children. The usual campus hijinks of the era held no charm for them. They had their own hijinks. 

They were more serious men, you see, having just fought a war. Yet, like all students everywhere, they sometimes put studies on the back burner, accepting lower grades as a  reasonable price for the rich social life of The Units. That social life included beer, cigarettes, the needs of their toddlers, and late-night bridge games.

The family next door, with whom we shared a wall, was Bud and Helen Steele and their daughter Heather. Helen and Bud played bridge with Mommy and Daddy most nights in their place or ours. When the visiting couple got the contract, the one who was dummy got up and ran next door to check on the ostensibly sleeping child. Bud, whose name was Virgil, was a wiry man with a ready smile, from a family that farmed just south of Galesburg. Helen was a fresh-faced and friendly young woman from Saskatchewan. I don’t know how they managed to find each other, but they made a great match. They remained fast friends with our family long after The Units and until their dying days. My younger sister and I still keep in touch with Heather and her siblings, Hugh and Linelle.

Diversions and Hijinks

One of the men in The Units sought to beautify the little patch of green grass in front of his place by planting two or three sapling trees. Several of his colleagues, by dark of night, dug up the trees and, perhaps inspired by the beer, re-planted them upside-down.

Iceman and children. German Federal Archives, published under the  Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany license.

Life was likewise fun for us tots. A small pack of us roamed The Units, outdoors in almost any weather, older ones picking on younger ones. In summer the iceman came twice a week. Our iceboxes had to be replenished with large blocks of ice, which were slid into the upper compartment to cool the meat, butter, eggs, and milk in the lower compartment. The iceman used black wrought-iron tongs to lug these ice blocks into our kitchens. We kids waited beside the iceman’s idling truck until he came out, tongs empty, to get another ice-cake. Then the boldest of us, Dale Price, begged ice chips from the iceman. He gave us each a two- or three-inch sliver of ice to hold in our hands, very cold under the hot sun. You had to brush dirt and sawdust off the ice chip. Then you sucked on it for as long as you could stand, dropped it, and ran off to play another game. 

It may not sound like much, Gentle Reader; but for us it was a treat.

One time Dale Price drank turpentine from an old Campbell’s soup can my mommy had left on the back stoop, midway through a furniture painting project. Dale was rushed to the hospital to get his stomach pumped out. “Darn that Dale Price,” Mommy said. “Always getting into things.”

The Railroad

Burlington engine No. 5633, no longer going anywhere, on static display in Douglas, Wyoming. Photo by Wusel007, published under the  Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Galesburg was a railroad town, astride two great lines: The Acheson, Topeka and Santa Fe, and the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy. The Units stood across South Cherry Street from the main line of the CB&Q. I clearly remember standing in our front yard on a bright morning, watching a fast train zoom by, pulled by a chugging black steam locomotive, perhaps a 4-8-4 “Northern,” a long cone of white smoke streaming out behind it. At night, I lay in my crib beside Teddy, my bear and best friend, and listened to the imponderable chug, roll, and bump of iron thunder as switch engines sorted and grouped railcars in the nearby Burlington yards. 

Mrs. Grable’s School

Life went on. Daddy had a part-time job taking the Galesburg Register-Mail to the outlying district of Bushnell in the afternoons. The GI Bill provided tuition, subsistence, books and supplies, equipment, and counseling services for veterans in college; but daily  expenses, beyond “subsistence,” could be tight. When I was three, Mommy got a part-time job as a secretary in an auto parts company, and I began attending a nursery school, “Mrs. Grable’s.” 

1950 DeSoto Suburban ad, Public Domain. Scanned by Alden Jewell, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Mrs. Grable had a large house with a big backyard and lots of toys and crayons. One or two other old ladies helped her wrangle kids. She had maybe a dozen of us. She picked us in the morning in her DeSoto Suburban—a big car with jump seats and room enough for the whole dozen of us. Later in the day she drove around The Units and dropped us off one by one, like circus clowns alighting from a mystery vehicle every afternoon at three.

Blessings, 

Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Author 

Larry F. Sommers

09.02.25
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Way Out West, Part IV

The written word is primary.

James Fennimore Cooper, c. 1850. Photo by Matthew Brady. Public Domain.

Long before Marshal Matt Dillon strode the dusty streets of Dodge City; before Hoppy, Roy, and Gene rode the range; before Tom Mix and Hoot Gibson twirled their lassoes; before William S. Hart oozed western authenticity; before The Great Train Robbery was committed to celluloid—in fact, before movies could be produced and radio waves modulated—there were writers singing the praises, and hyping the romance, of the American West.

James Fennimore Cooper (1789-1851) may have been the first novelist to glamorize the West in his Leatherstocking Tales, which featured rugged frontier scout Natty Bumppo. The Deerslayer and his Native American friends, Chingachgook and Uncas, held sway in the forests of New York State. But in those days, as mentioned previously, the West was in the East. At least The Prairie—the last novel in the series, in story chronology—takes the aged Pathfinder all the way to the vast plains beyond the Mississippi.

Ned Buntline, c. 1886. Photo by Sarony, New York. Public Domain.

After Cooper, the next notable writer to euhemerize the West was Edward Zane Carroll Judson Sr. (1821-1886), a heavy drinker who went about the country giving temperance lectures, a raffish troublemaker who barely escaped the noose in more jurisdictions than one. Seeking sensational material to publish about Wild Bill Hickok, who had driven him off at gunpoint, Judson on the rebound met William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody. The two gregarious men became friends, and Judson’s career as “Ned Buntline,” writer of western stories, was launched.

He published a serial novel, Buffalo Bill: King of the Border Men, in the New York Weekly beginning in 1869. That became the basis for two plays about the great man, one of which—written by Buntline—starred Cody as himself, with appearing Buntline in a supporting role. For several years, the great Cody shot buffalo for the railroad in summer and portrayed himself on stage in winter. This was Buffalo Bill’s introduction to show biz. If you want to know where that led, rent or borrow a copy of Annie Get Your Gun.

Emma Ghent Curtis, author of The Administratrix, c. 1894. Photographer unknown. Public Domain.

Buntline wrote other western-themed dime novels, none as successful as his early promotion of Buffalo Bill. Judson (Buntline) died of congestive heart failure in 1886, having briefly been one of the wealthiest authors in the country.

Owen Wister, c. 1903. Photographer unknown. Public Domain.

Meanwhile, Emma Ghent Curtis (1860-1918), a Hoosier transplanted to Colorado, was writing The Administratrix. Published in 1889, it was the first real cowboy novel, outside of the dime-novel tradition. Its protagonist is a woman who falls in love with a cowboy and then cross-dresses as a cowboy in order to find his murderer. Though Curtis may be fairly said to have invented the genre—wouldn’t you know?—it’s a man who gets all the credit.

Poster for the Broadway production of The Virginian by Wister and Kirke La Shelle, 1903. Public Domain.

Philadelphian Owen Wister (1860-1938) penned a novel of the West and got it published in 1902 as The Virginian. Unlike Curtis’s obscure novel, The Virginian sold 200,000 copies in the first year. It’s credited with establishing many now-familiar tropes including the cowboy hero, the innocent schoolmarm, and the devious villain. Wister became “the father of Western fiction.” The Virginian was made into a successful stage play and has been the basis of five movies and a TV show. The original novel has sold 1.5 million copies to date.

Riders of the Purple Sage, by Zane Grey. Harper & Brothers. Fair use.

In Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania, a dentist, former minor league baseball player, and aspiring author named Zane Grey (1872-1939) read The Virginian, studied its style and structure, and decided to try his hand at a Western novel. After western adventures including a hunting trip to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, he got the feel of the West and taught himself to be a convincing Western writer. His novel The Last of the Plainsmen was rejected by Harper & Brothers but serialized by Outing magazine. The next one, The Heritage of the Desert, was published by Harper and became a best-seller. Two years later he produced Riders of the Purple Sage, his most successful book and one of the most successful Western novels in history.

Grey died in 1939 at age 67, the author of more than ninety books, most of them Westerns, and one of America’s first millionaire authors. 

“Hopalong Takes Command,” an illustration by artist Frank Schoonover for a 1905 Hopalong Cassidy story, in the collection of the Delaware Art Museum. Licensed under CC-BY-SA-3.0.

Another who deserves mention is Clarence E. Mulford (1883-1956). In 1904, Mulford created the cowboy character Hopalong Cassidy. In a series of short stories and 28 novels from then until 1941, Mulford sketched Cassidy’s adventures, elaborating a “detailed and authentic world filled with characters drawn from his extensive library research” (Wikipedia). 

Mulford sold film rights to Hollywood producer Harry Sherman, who made a popular series of Hopalong Cassidy films. On the silver screen, Cassidy’s character was changed from a profane, rough-hewn cowpuncher to the rather genteel, upstanding, hero portrayed by actor William Boyd and idolized by millions of us kids in the 1950s. (I even bought Hopalong Cassidy Cookies. They were delicious.)

Louis L’Amour in 1970. Photo by Thomas J. Kravitz, Los Angeles Times. Licensed under CC-BY-4.0

If Zane Grey and Clarence Mulford were prolific, the next great Western author was superabundant. Louis L’Amour (1908-1988) wrote 89 novels, fourteen short-story collections, and two full-length works of nonfiction. Almost all of them Westerns. His novels really began to sell around 1950. Just at that time, when he was still a hungry writer, L’Amour actually wrote four new Hopalong Cassidy novels, under a pseudonym, under contract for people who were planning a series of books and magazine stories to capitalize on Hoppy’s new-found fame. 

Poster for Hondo, a movie based on a Louis L’Amour short story, “The Gift of Cochise,” novelized by L’Amour upon the film’s release. Fair use.

L’Amour’s version of Hopalong Cassidy was inspired by Mulford’s original roughneck, but the editors softened the character to comport with his new Hollywood identity. L’Amour disclaimed authorship of those four books forever after.

Your New Favorite Author’s long-time friend Bill Martinez, who worked for Bantam Books when L’Amour was under contract to them, escorted the celebrated author on elaborate book tours. He was a nice man, Bill told me, but on tour he needed someone to protect him and carve out down time, especially since he was ill at that stage of his life.

Poster for Lonesome Dove, based on the novel by McMurtry. Fair use.

And just when we might have thought all possible changes had been rung on the Western literary canon, along comes Larry McMurtry (1936-2021). McMurtry was a writer for all seasons, producing a large body of work in several genres and types, but much of it was Western fiction. The most famous book is probably McMurtry’s epic 1985 cowboy novel Lonesome Dove. The book, about retired Texas Rangers who own a cattle company and go on a cattle drive, won the Pulitzer Prize and was adapted into a four-part TV miniseries starring Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duvall. Because of the era when it was written, Lonesome Dove dealt with adult issues including sex, violence, and betrayal in a more forthright way. Most people who have read Lonesome Dove—or, for that matter, any of McMurtry’s other major works—acknowledge him to be a master storyteller.

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Your New Favorite Writer is well aware, Dear Reader, that there have been Westerns written and filmed since Larry McMurtry. But I think it’s amazingly advanced of me to work in Lonesome Dove, what with its being post-1957 and all. 

Perhaps you’ll be relieved to learn this installment concludes our little colloquium on Westerns—except that there is one curious post-script to scribe, or footnote to note, about a couple of larger-than-life characters who bridged the span of time, having one boot firmly in the Old West and the other in what we may think of as modern-day America.

Tune in next week for One More Round.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer