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November 2025
RL/Culture

Writers of the Plains

Five writers who turned the Western from pulp fiction into modern epics of tragedy and romance.
By Will Blythe
Writing fiction is usually quite a journey, and as it turns out, journeying through the American West is usually quite an inspiration for fiction writing. Such is the case for five late and brilliant writers—Jim Harrison, Denis Johnson, Charles Portis, Larry McMurtry, and Cormac McCarthy—all of whom lived in or nearby the West, roamed through it again and again, and astonishingly, subsequently composed extraordinary narratives of excruciating characters cranking through the West. Though these authors died in the last nine years, their literature remains alive, lively, and conceivably an eternity of reading. For writers (and residents as well), living in the American West was (and still is) like existing in a new country of their own, with very few laws imposed, if any at all. In fact, the West often comes across more like a novel planet, blatantly physical and anti-historical. The actual US government has tended to feel far away from many Westerners, less constrictive than with the rest of the nation, and almost nonexistent compared to the vast landscape of mountains, mesas, deserts, forests, plains, cliffs, canyons, rivers, basins, and skies.
SADDLE EPIC
Anjelica Huston and Robert Duvall starred in a 1989 television miniseries of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. The series swept the awards circuit, nabbing 18 Emmys—including two honoring Huston and Duvall’s performances.
Jim Harrison, who died in 2016, envisioned the Native Americans as an essential influence on this landscape. He praised them in part because he felt they “paid a lifetime of attention to the natural world in order to survive.” Harrison wrote, “As the Sioux used to say, ‘Be brave, the earth is all that lasts.’” For decades, he lived his own version of that earth in Livingston, Montana, and Patagonia, Arizona. I got to know Jim over the years, and he wrote me one day that his best life then was “trout fishing on a drift boat in Montana.” His novel Dalva centers on a woman with partial Sioux heritage who falls in love with a similar man. And Harrison’s novella Legends of the Fall, which became a powerful movie as well, is one of the great Western journey narratives, set initially in the remote wilderness of Montana during the early 1900s, and focused on a father and his three sons, all three falling in love with the same lovely woman. The brothers end up smashing into Europe to battle against Germany in World War I, with two of them surviving and returning to Montana for an ongoing tough life in the upper portion of the state.
According to Larry McMurtry, “It’s hard to go wrong if one writes at length about the Old West, still the phantom leg of the American psyche.”
Like those characters, my friend, the poet, fiction, and nonfiction writer Denis Johnson, who wrote fearless and poignant articles for us at Esquire, spent many years in the high West as well, moving up to northern Idaho in 1989 with the help of his buddy, the artist Sam Messer. He and I started hanging out and working together the year before. Denis’ wife, Cindy, just told me the other day, “California was his dream home, but he exiled to Idaho—a compromise for him. He did love the West, however. He went all over that world. He climbed every trail, every mountain, three mountain ranges in Idaho. He had an absolute love of the wilderness of the West. He embraced it. He loved moving, he loved adventures. We didn’t really fit in it, but we did love it nonetheless.” Like Denis and Cindy, Robert Grainier, the protagonist of Denis’ great novella Train Dreams, also ends up in northern Idaho, starting in the early 1900s all the way up to the 1960s. A logger, his painful experiences only allow him to intermittently fit in, in part because he loses his wife and daughter to a fire at their house in the woods. He does, however, travel through the West (as did his author), lumbering in trains, rambling in cars, and flying once in a plane. Late in his age, he almost makes it—but not quite—to the Pacific. Train Dreams, which was published as a book in 2011, six years before Denis died, has also just been turned into a film, coming out this November.
There’s also a lot of meandering in Charles Portis’ simultaneously revengeful and comic novel True Grit, which begins when the elderly protagonist Mattie Ross starts looking back at herself when she was 14 in 1878, desperate then to capture the man who murdered her father in the Wild West, aka the Indian Territory. To help find the killer, she seeks assistance from a federal marshal Rooster Cogburn, who isn’t an easy ally. Two marvelous movies have been made of True Grit. Portis published this novel in 1968 after he had headed back to Arkansas, where he grew up. Prior to scrawling fiction, he had been reporting about the South for the New York Herald Tribune, then spent a year in London as the newspaper’s bureau chief. Despite his success as a journalist, however, he happily cut away from that busy realm, and created his touching, humorous fiction in a pleasantly solitary life. He died from Alzheimer’s disease in 2020.
WESTERN WORDSMITHS
Clockwise, from top left: Cormac McCarthy, photographed in 1973. In the early ’90s, rumors circulated that McCarthy, a notorious recluse, was living under an oil derrick in western Texas. “Well, not yet,” he told the author of this piece. Larry McMurtry, author of Lonesome Dove, pictured in 1978 at Booked Up, a bookstore he owned in Georgetown. Ten years later, McMurtry opened a second location in his hometown of Archer City, Texas. Jim Harrison, photographed at home in Livingston, Montana, in 2013. Harrison described his best life as “trout fishing on a drift boat in Montana.”
WESTERN WORDSMITHS
Clockwise, from top left: Cormac McCarthy, photographed in 1973. In the early ’90s, rumors circulated that McCarthy, a notorious recluse, was living under an oil derrick in western Texas. “Well, not yet,” he told the author of this piece. Larry McMurtry, author of Lonesome Dove, pictured in 1978 at Booked Up, a bookstore he owned in Georgetown. Ten years later, McMurtry opened a second location in his hometown of Archer City, Texas. Jim Harrison, photographed at home in Livingston, Montana, in 2013. Harrison described his best life as “trout fishing on a drift boat in Montana.”
Like True Grit, Larry McMurtry’s legendary novel Lonesome Dove also occurs in the 1870s. “It’s hard to go wrong if one writes at length about the Old West, still the phantom leg of the American psyche,” McMurtry asserted back in 2000. He clearly perceived and felt that phantom leg in his creation of Lonesome Dove, where thousands of cattle are herded up from Texas to the Montana Territory by two former and aggravated Texas rangers, who, as they head north, delve into a Western world full of murder, rape, robbery, and execution. They do end up admiring the beauty of Montana, but then one is wounded and dies, while the other survives and heads back south to Texas. That’s where McMurtry, the passionate writer, delighted reader, and enthusiastic bookstore owner, was born and spent most of his life, though he eventually passed away in Arizona in 2021. In every one of these Wild West stories, there’s a lot of roaming and a lot of dying. A lot of mystery, too, along with an enormously charismatic countryside, not yet settled by an expansive population. Consider Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West, published in 1985. When McCarthy wrote that novel, he had become obsessed with the Southwest, having moved from Tennessee to Texas, and eventually to New Mexico, where he died in 2023. Cormac and I laughed together back in 1992 about a legendary rumor out there, asserting that he was living in the western portion of the state, underneath an oil derrick. “Well, not yet,” he chuckled to me. His central character in Blood Meridian, a teenager known as the “kid,” also shifts, like his author, from Tennessee to Texas, where in his case, he becomes a member of violent gangs, attacking Native Americans and Mexicans in the 19th century, and being attacked as well. He hangs out occasionally with the mystified and often vicious Judge Holden, who sees their vicinity as inevitably savage. In fact, nearly all the characters, simultaneously brutal and terrified, wonder how and where to survive, and who else should survive, aside from themselves. Intriguingly, that anxious mystery in Blood Meridian in regard to the nature of morality in the midst of a landscape of nature is found in all the literature described here.
Reading all these books set in the American West is usually quite a journey as well, and as it turns out, the readers’ passion for such visions of the West likely journeys them into additional literature achieved by both living authors like Annie Proulx, Marilynne Robinson, Richard Ford, and Tom McGuane, and deceased storytellers such as Willa Cather, Vladimir Nabokov, Wallace Stegner, and John Williams. Those writers’ perceptions of the West over many decades are strikingly akin to the five late writers here.
PLAINS SPOKEN
Far left: Richard Ford, photographed in 2018. Novels like Rock Springs and Wildlife are referred to as Ford’s “Montana books”; Willa Cather, photographed in 1920. Raised in Nebraska as a child of homesteaders, Cather often wrote about life on the prairie.
PLAINS SPOKEN
Far left: Richard Ford, photographed in 2018. Novels like Rock Springs and Wildlife are referred to as Ford’s “Montana books”; Willa Cather, photographed in 1920. Raised in Nebraska as a child of homesteaders, Cather often wrote about life on the prairie.
In book after book, story after story, decade after decade, there’s a seemingly eternal obsession with the landscape and its emotional effect on its natives living in and traveling through their West. For instance, Cormac McCarthy and Willa Cather, in their novels precisely 60 years apart from each other, portray characters staring with passion and intensity at mesas. Yes, mesas. In Blood Meridian, McCarthy describes gangsters who “in the evening they came out upon a mesa that overlooked all the country to the north. ... Sparse on the mesa the dry weeds lashed in the wind like the earth’s long echo of lance and spear in old encounters forever unrecorded.” This takes place by the Animas peaks that one day become part of New Mexico. Similarly, Cather’s novel The Professor’s House, published exactly 100 years ago in 1925, contains an astounding chapter focused on the professor’s former student, Tom Outland, who finds himself climbing up, staring into, and eventually devoted to a steep New Mexico mesa, where he discovers an ancient, concealed village built by Native Americans. “Once again I had that glorious feeling that I’ve never had anywhere else,” Outland declares, “the feeling of being on the mesa, in a world above the world.” Yes, indeed, a world above the world! That is the apparent nature of the American West as perceived by all of these magnificent writers, by their characters, and by their readers. And in all likelihood, by nearly all Westerners as well.
WILL BLYTHE, former literary editor at Esquire, is the author of The New York Times best seller To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever and has had fiction anthologized in The Best American Short Stories.
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