100 Books Like The Shining Mountains

I had never been out of a Los Angeles suburb until my high school biology teacher took our class on a river trip running rapids down the Yampa and Green Rivers in Colorado and Utah. The trip was absolutely exhilarating and opened my eyes to the American West and to a career exploring its geology and landscapes. Fifty years and over 300 field trips later, mostly in southern California, I finally learned enough to write Roadside Geology of Southern California. That book was followed by the second editions of Geology Underfoot in Southern California, and Geology Underfoot in Death Valley and Eastern California with co-authors Allen Glazner and Robert Sharp.

I recall the exact moment when my interest sparked about frontier prostitution and Denver’s underbelly — a friend mentioned the ‘bad blood’ in her family — an ancestor who was a second-rate madam and who employed her own daughters. The quest started. Who were these women, and why did they make the choices they did? I’ve spent years chasing down traces of the old west’s prostitutes, fascinated by their identities and lives. The west had opportunities for women who were willing to take chances. As a fifth-generation Coloradoan, I hoped to capture the story of these enterprising and overlooked women, their lives, and the world around them.

At some point I decided that if I was going to teach US history, I better have a good sense of what the place looked like. So I drove across the country—and then back again—and then again, and then once more, each time at a different latitude. I drove through North Dakota and South Dakota, Montana and Idaho, Nebraska and Kansas, Arkansas and Oklahoma, Louisiana and Texas, up and down California, Oregon and Washington, and on and on. I got addicted to seeing the landscape in all its amazing variety and vastness, and seeing the landscape made the histories come alive. 

I’m a retired English prof with a lifelong interest in history. My father fostered my fascination with Civil War battlefields, and growing up in Florida, I studied the Seminole wars in school and later at FSU. While teaching at the University of Idaho (nearly 50 years), I pursued my interest in the Indian wars of the mid-19th century and developed a curiosity about tribes in the inland Northwest, notably the Coeur d’Alene, Spokane, and Nez Perce. My critical biography of Blackfeet novelist James Welch occasioned reading and research on the Plains tribes. I recommend his nonfiction book, Killing Custer: The Battle of Little Bighorn and the Fate the Plains Indians.

I have always had an interest in the American frontier and the Native peoples. But while researching the novel Brave Enemies and Boone: A Biography I spent years studying and visiting places where the stories occur, and using archives and libraries. However, the most important consideration is storytelling, rewarding the reader with a good story.

As a college instructor and a student of Western American Literature for many, many years I have read a great number of western novels for my classes and for my literary studies. In addition to my doctoral dissertation on the topic, I have written and published numerous articles and reviews on western writers, and I have given many public presentations as well. I have a long-standing interest in what makes good works good. As a fiction writer, I have published more than thirty traditional western novels with major publishers, and have won several national awards for my western novels and short stories. 

I go by the title AmericanStudier in my public scholarship and take that name very seriously. I believe nothing is more important for our future than better remembering our past and that pushing the nation toward its most inspiring ideals requires grappling with our hardest and most painful histories. On my AmericanStudies blog, in my Saturday Evening Post Considering History column, and in all my other scholarly, public, and social media content, I am committed to sharing our histories and stories, figures and works, voices, and writing in all forms and for all audiences. I hope you’ll join me in this work by reading and sharing these great books!

I set out to write my novel, a magical realism western, despite knowing nothing about magical realism or Westerns. I had to quickly get myself versed in both, and I was somewhat surprised to discover that, even in the 21st century, the Westerns that are often held up as the best feature a lot of tired stereotypes about brave white men, lawless people of color (when they are mentioned at all), women without agency, and a wild land that requires taming. I believe that my novel upends some of these Western tropes, and I am happy to report that many other novels in recent years have done the same. 

I didn’t sit down to write Carried Away with a personal sermon in my back pocket. No buried lessons or hidden curriculum—it was just a story I wanted to tell. But stories have a way of outsmarting you. 

So when I chose these books, I wasn’t looking for perfect comparisons—I was looking for echoes. Some of these books will drag you through POW camps or strand you on a lifeboat with a tiger; others will lean in and whisper that you’ve been running a program and calling it personality. A few say the quiet part out loud—about grit, meaning, and purpose. Others ring you up with fable, abstractions, or science, but they leave their mark just the same. 

History and video games have defined much of my life, so it’s no surprise I’m writing about both. I was born in Sweden and first encountered the Wild West through the Lucky Luke comic books (huge in Europe!), and they instilled in me a fascination with American history. I emigrated to the U.S. with my family at age 8 and misspent most of my adolescence playing video games. In college, I returned to my childhood passion for studying the past and earned a BA, MA, and PhD in American history. Since 2013, I’ve been a professor at the University of Tennessee. Red Dead’s History is my second book.