Here are 4 books that The Bass Reeves Trilogy fans have personally recommended once you finish the The Bass Reeves Trilogy series.
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I’m an amalgam of all of my varied interests and varied employments from actress and singer to corporate paralegal at a movie studio. Since my teenage years, I’ve loved to research. That joy leads into writing factually-accurate historical fiction set in the West. Delving into the private lives of both the fictional and the real people gives the reader a better understanding of the characters’ designated paths leading to the events upon which my novel is based. My recommendations for the best books set in the West with in-depth characters have qualities I’ve employed in my novel. Some of these books also delve into characters from differing races, reflecting most towns in the Old West.
To my experience, this was the first novel of alternative historical fiction.
What if General George Armstrong Custer had survived the Battle of Little Bighorn? I loved the idea that history could be turned on its ear. The most fascinating parts of the book are the court appearances of Major Reno and Captain Benteen, who both survived the Little Bighorn.
Author Jones used their actual testimonies from Reno’s 1879 trial in Chicago. Having been to the battlefield, I understood better how the fight turned against Custer after reading this book. It’s well worth the read.
Suppose that George Armstrong Custer did not die at the Battle of Little Bighorn. Suppose that, instead, he was found close to death at the scene of the defeat and was brought to trial for his actions. With a masterful blend of fact and fiction, The Court-Martial of George Armstrong Custer tells us what might have happened at that trial as it brings to life the most exciting period in the history of the American West. About the Author Douglas C. Jones served in the U.S. Army until his retirement in 1968. He has taught at the University of Wisconsin.
I’m an amalgam of all of my varied interests and varied employments from actress and singer to corporate paralegal at a movie studio. Since my teenage years, I’ve loved to research. That joy leads into writing factually-accurate historical fiction set in the West. Delving into the private lives of both the fictional and the real people gives the reader a better understanding of the characters’ designated paths leading to the events upon which my novel is based. My recommendations for the best books set in the West with in-depth characters have qualities I’ve employed in my novel. Some of these books also delve into characters from differing races, reflecting most towns in the Old West.
Perhaps Arizona’s most widely recognized event, the thirty seconds of gunfight at O.K. Corral in Tombstone isn’t the main emphasis in Epitaph. That belongs to Russell’s engrossing depictions of the intensely personal relationships between the Earp brothers, their girlfriends and wives, their routines, and addictions.
As I found out in researching for my novel, if you get the accurate facts about the personalities and actions of the good and the bad people, who actually lived in the Old West, you’re well on the way to writing a novel.
John Philip Clum started the newspaper in Tombstone and called it Epitaph, because “No tombstone is complete without its epitaph.” To complete your reading about the Old West, include Epitaph.
Mary Doria Russell, the bestselling, award-winning author of The Sparrow, returns with Epitaph. An American Iliad, this richly detailed and meticulously researched historical novel continues the story she began in Doc, following Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday to Tombstone, Arizona, and to the gunfight at the O.K. Corral.
A deeply divided nation. Vicious politics. A shamelessly partisan media. A president loathed by half the populace. Smuggling and gang warfare along the Mexican border. Armed citizens willing to stand their ground and take law into their own hands. . . .
I’m an amalgam of all of my varied interests and varied employments from actress and singer to corporate paralegal at a movie studio. Since my teenage years, I’ve loved to research. That joy leads into writing factually-accurate historical fiction set in the West. Delving into the private lives of both the fictional and the real people gives the reader a better understanding of the characters’ designated paths leading to the events upon which my novel is based. My recommendations for the best books set in the West with in-depth characters have qualities I’ve employed in my novel. Some of these books also delve into characters from differing races, reflecting most towns in the Old West.
The West used to begin in Ohio. Some of my ancestors moved there around 1816. Their experiences must have been very similar to those of the Lucketts family depicted in The Trees by the masterful writer, Conrad Richter.
The trees so closely grown and tall, one could not see through them or over them. They had to be toppled. Children got lost in the trees while playing; some never made it back to their homes. Lost forever.
The rich narrative, reminiscent of pioneers’ old diaries the novelist read prior to writing, fills the reader’s ear with character, honesty, pathos, and heart. Richter won the Pulitzer Prize for The Town, the third novel in his Heartland Trilogy. But the trilogy’s first book, The Trees, is my favorite.
“They moved along in the bobbing, springy gait of a family that followed the woods as some families follow the sea.” In that first sentence Conrad Richter sets the mood of this magnificent epic of the American wilderness. Toward the close of the eighteenth century the land west of the Alleghenies and north of the Ohio river was an unbroken sea of trees. Beneath them the forest trails were dark, silent, and lonely, brightened only by a few lost beams of sunlight. Here the Lucketts, a wild, woodsfaring family, lived their roaming life, pushing ever westward as the frontier advanced…
I was never a fan of superheroes, not even as a child. My heroes had to be credible, human, acceptably flawed yet redeemable by a personal moral code that ultimately defined their actions. The heroes in my favorite books are of this ilk, determined to pursue the right thing, regardless of how life challenges them. It speaks to how I’ve tried to live my life–and still do.
An atypical Western, I loved its unusual, yet believable plot.
A drifter, George Briggs, is hired to bring four women, maddened by the bleakness of the Nebraska plains, east to civilizational care.
Briggs fulfills his contract, guiding them through the threat of Indian attacks and other challenges to safety. A feeling pervaded the story that Briggs had been given one shot at elevating himself above an otherwise unremarkable life and he came through. This is a feature that I love in almost any story–the idea of redemption.
I love to believe that potential exists within me.
The Homesman opens in the 1850s, when early pioneers are doing anything they can to survive dreadful conditions. Women especially struggle with broken hearts and minds as they face bitter hardships: One nineteen-year-old mother loses her three children to diphtheria in three days; another woman left alone for two nights is forced to shoot wolves to protect herself. The situation calls for a "homesman"-a person charged with taking these women, driven mad by the conditions of rural life, to asylums in the East. Not exactly a job people are lining up for, it falls to Mary Bee Cuddy, an ex-teacher…
