The relatively large number of new titles that lead off this volume’s list of books representing new westerns in 2008 is somewhat misleading. Although nearly sixty works are represented here, a good fourth of them are actually books with 2007 copyright dates, as they were issued too late in the calendar year to make the previous 2008 [What Do I Read Next?] Volume’s list, or they actually were not issued until early 2008, even though they carry last year’s publication date. This should have the effect, of course, of brightening the somewhat dismal outlook offered by the list of western fiction at the end of 2007. However, when one considers the number of reprints and continuing series in the total list–more than a third–little positive news can be gleaned insofar as the future of the western’s return as a major fiction category is concerned, or at least as a category with a familiar and recognizable series of books that can be readily classified as “western.”
Continuing speculation as to why the western continues to languish at or near the bottom of publishing categories is probably as useless as it is endless. This year’s Western Writers of America meeting in Scottsdale, Arizona reportedly saw more than one major session descend into acrimonious and, to be frank, pointless debate over the issue. Stalwart writers such as Loren D. Estleman, Paul Hutton, Johnny D. Boggs, and others steadfastly continue to declare that the entire argument is moot, that the category is as healthy as it’s ever been. Others privately opine that self-publishing, e-publishing, and other questionable publishing practices, including the broadening of the definition of “western,” have eroded the integrity of the category overall, thus diminishing its potential to stage a comeback as a major player in popular fiction. In between are the steady producers of the series westerns, who continue to generate title after title, several series running into double digits, with no indication of slowing down, as well as newcomer writers, who stand bewildered to find that they have finally “broken into” a category of publishing that well may be disappearing more rapidly than did the buffalo or Longhorn cow. And standing more or less “outside” the corral, as it were, are literary writers who pay utterly no attention to WWA or any other outfit, including the more scholarly Western Literature Association–that celebrates or typifies any category.
Where the truth lies is hard to discern. Significant on the last several lists is the growing number of what might be called “contemporary westerns,” or novels and stories that are set in a western geography but which have little to do with the traditional elements of the traditional western novel. These would include a healthy number of romance and inspirational novels, as well as a fair representation of fantasy and science fiction pieces, and post-apocalyptic books. The greatest number of books, however, continue to come either from traditional western or romance publishers who specialize in category fiction (Leisure, Forge, etc.) or from small, private and often obscure publishing houses scattered about the country. Not insignificantly, Five-Star, which was practically leading the field a few years ago and gleaned several major awards, is sparsely represented on this newest list; and university presses, about the last bastion for the literary western, also are very few in number. Offerings from the more “literary” presses such as Viking, Dutton, Harper’s, etc. are actually more numerous.
Some accoutrements of the old-fashioned oater are present in this list’s dozen or so books set in more or less modern times and concerning more or less modern issues, but for the most part, such familiar devices appear in an ironic guise or as “flavor” for a more modern fiction structure. The twenty or so stand-alone historical pieces, also, seem to represent a departure from the standard formula of the old-fashioned western, tending to use the historical American West more as background rather than as an essential element of plot and character development, or certainly as part of an extended allegory with the themes of the American West providing substance as well as moral lesson. But the majority of the works on the list offer pretty much the same old writers producing the same old books with the same old characters doing the same old things in the same old settings. There’s a staleness that suggests stagnation here, and the slight rise in total numbers is betrayed by a decline in originality or vision.
Once again, it’s hard not to try to find a reason for this, since other genre categories continue to maintain a healthy presence and even to grow a bit, not only in numbers but in expanding themes and formulaic perimeters. Yet such a query abut the western may be a fool’s errand, since it is probably a reflection of a cultural sea-change throughout the American reading public’s taste and imagination, something that may extend through the remainder of this year and into next, as the public’s attention is more distracted by a different kind of historical prerogative than is characterized by the typical western. A casual observation of the nonfiction lists suggests that interest in the factual, historical West is also down, or at least the number of offerings in history and other fields of inquiry seems to be reduced.
It may well be that the American consumer’s love-affair with the frontier as both myth and foundation is over; country and western music is gradually shifting more and more toward a generic soft-rock sound and away from the “cowboy hayride” twangs of the past, and modes of dress and tastes in popular food is reflecting a far more urban–if not urbane–trend than was reflected in the national embracing of buffalo wings, chicken-fried steak, and barbeque a decade or so ago. Even the theater and cinema seem to have lost all representation of western themes, especially the cinema.
No Country for Old Men (2005) by Cormac McCarthy
There has always been a kind of symbiotic relationship between film and print westerns. Certainly the hey-day of both began in the late thirties and extended into the seventies, when the slow decline in the film western presaged the sharper decline of the print western ten or twelve years later. A resurgence of western films in the late eighties and early nineties was paralleled by resurgence in the same trend in western fiction, and many long-time western writers anticipate that a similar Hollywood phenomenon might have the same impact, should it recur. To a great extent, of course, this is wishful thinking on the part of western writers. Watching the meteoric success of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove or even Elmer Kelton’s more modest but still winning novel adaptations, as well as Cormac McCarthy’s stunning triumph with No Country for Old Men provides an undying dream that at some point Hollywood will once more embrace the western film as a mainstay and start snapping up properties left and right.
Significantly, though, no new western motion pictures or television series are on the horizon (a single offering on a cable network this summer excited only the smallest notice). Even contemporarily set films seem to be avoiding western climes in spite of the Cohen brothers’ adaptation of the McCarthy vehicle and the sensational success of the Annie Proulx story, “Brokeback Mountain.” But hope dies hard on the frontier of western writing. This past spring, The American Film Institute sponsored an internet poll (one imitated by the WWA) asking members to name the “top ten” westerns. The response was as predictable as it was enthusiastic, indicating a sharp interest in the topic. The AFI list was as follows:
1. The Searchers
2. High Noon
3. Shane
4. Unforgiven
5. Red River
6. The Wild Bunch
7. Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid
8. McCabe & Mrs. Miller
9. Stagecoach (1939)
10. Cat Ballou
The WWA list voted on by members was quite similar:
1. Shane
2. High Noon
3. The Searchers
4. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
5. Dances with Wolves
6. The Wild Bunch
7. Red River
8. Tombstone
9. The Magnificent Seven
10. Open Range
Of far more interest than the lists themselves was a series of somewhat fractious debates over the subject–mostly conducted on the internet and mostly centering on questions of historical accuracy–and especially at the WWA, what actually constitutes a western in the first place. And, naturally, there’re always questions about cinematic quality and the inevitable argument over individual taste.
Of even greater curiosity, though, was how many of these films were based on original screenplays, not on previously published western novels or stories. On the AFI list, only three original screenplays are represented (surprising from an outfit that counts among its members only a comparative few writers who are not also producers, directors, or actors); on the WWA list, five of the ten selected films had no literary source. Even more curious, both lists have at least one parody or send-up of older forms, and only two or three films on either list might be seen as iconoclastic. This may be the most important point of all when either of the lists is considered.
Making much ado about films or even arguments about the “best films” does not go to the heart of the question of what has happened to the western novel anymore than does speculative debate about changing audience priorities and reading sophistication or the seemingly endless argument over what constitutes an actual western in the greater scheme of publishing. Ultimately, it comes down to the point that no matter how it’s defined, the traditional western is continuing to lag in popularity, and it seems unable to change itself to meet a more contemporary audience’s taste.
One might argue that such an argument is the wrong-side-around, that the audience’s taste is responsive to whatever the publishing houses have to offer; in other words, if they would print it, the audience would come. But this may beg the question. Large houses, in particular, spend millions of dollars in surveying demographics, polling readerships, and evaluating sales figures of various categories. If there was a potential profit to be made in publishing more western fiction, it’s an easy bet they would do so. Certainly, even a casual observation of WWA or like organizations will reveal that there’s no shortage of manuscripts being proffered–and rejected. The point is that what is being written just isn’t addressing readers’ interests; and it may well be that the western author is facing the prospect of either converting what he or she is doing to a more contemporary demand and sensibility, or to watch the whole category die as a recognizable entity.
The Deerslayer; or, The First Warpath (1841) by James Fenimore Cooper
In a sense, this sort of thing has happened before; but then, the authors (and especially the publishers) of western fiction responded and virtually created a whole new category of fiction. In fairness, though, they had a whole new frontier and, thus, a whole new body of material to work with. About a hundred fifty years ago, the American appetite for western fiction was as great or greater than at any time in the more recent past; but the offerings being produced were losing ground against other stories (tales of the sea, i.e.; or romances set in the plantation South or even in urban environments; or antique historical melodramas set in antique times). Tales of wilderness adventure, Indian-fighting, and exploration of the frontier were still in demand, rejuvenated by a sudden realization that the United States now owned vast amounts of territory west of the Mississippi, lands that were simply here for the taking. The excitement about the new frontier was so great that an entirely new form of fiction publishing was created to answer it. Produced on cheap paper and sold for about twelve cents apiece, these “shilling shockers” (some sold for as much as a quarter) first emerged in the late 1830s. Primarily, the writers relied on stories that mostly followed the same format, heroic portrayal, and plot as could be directly derived from the prototypical hero and familiar plots created by James Fenimore Cooper in his highly popular “Leatherstocking Tales” that featured his creation, Natty Bumppo. Cooper’s highly prolific output was overshadowed by these stories of Bumppo as he evolved from Hawkeye to the Pathfinder to the Deerslayer in the five novels of the series published from the mid-1820s through the early 1840s (and which, in their chronological settings, actually worked backwards in time). The clear influence of the romances of Sir Walter Scott may be seen throughout these stories, and few are original in their makeup. Primarily chase/revenge quests, they often featured–in addition to the intrepid hero who embodied both the sensibilities of the civilized, educated easterner as well as the woodcraft-savvy, wise frontiersman–a more rustic character, unlettered and sometimes crudely primitive, whose background generally led him to foil the more genteel protagonist by presenting a rough-and-ready comrade or what would later be called a “side-kick,” a kind of reverse of Cervantes model that had been followed more or less consistently up to that point. Cooper would reflect this shift in the final novel of the Natty Bumppo books, The Deerslayer; or, The First Warpath (1841).
Such a heroic model morphed slightly throughout the 1830s by the introduction of a Jacksonian image that was more warrior-like and more devoted to purely democratic principles. Ultimately, the late 1830s western writer, such as Robert Montgomery Bird in his Old Nick of the Woods, tended to combine the two types into single heroes from time to time, a no-nonsense character who represented both the genteel Eastern sensibility and the rustic frontiersman in one entity. These novels thrived, even so, drawing more and more power from the reported (and wildly exaggerated) exploits of such actual figures as David Crockett and Daniel Boone and finding even more material in the Mexican War and “Gold Rush,” until Malaeska; or, The Indian Wife of the White Hunter was published by the firm of Beadle and Adams in 1860. Written by Sophia Winterbotham Stephens, a celebrated literary figure and editor of The Ladies’ Companion and Ladies’ World, this slim, cheaply produced “novelette,” imperfectly bound with a garish paper cover and decorated by elaborate woodcuts, sold for ten cents. It is regarded as the first “dime novel” and began a trend in western publishing that would last for nearly a century and represents possibly the most successful innovation in book publishing that would be seen until the advent of the mass-market paperback. Although Stephens did little to alter or advance the stereotypes and formula previously established, the book itself was so popular that it established a pattern for the western novel that would evolve and develop into the more recognizable forms of the twentieth century.
Beadle and Adams would continue publishing western fiction for nearly fifty years, and they created the industry standard for this inexpensive and highly popular fictional form. Derisively called “yellow backs” (although the covers were more of an orange hue) by “highbrow readers” who despaired of them (but somehow were also very familiar with them), they not only offered the reader a single original story, dime novels also provided a catalogue of the publisher’s other offerings and sometimes carried advertising to fill blank space. At one point, more than 250 writers were generating them for Beadle and Adams, each producing “novelettes” that averaged around 60,000 words and sold between 35,000 and 80,000 copies per title. By 1865, over 4,000,000 copies had been published, and the number would continue to grow through the end of the century. During the Civil War and even after, the booklets were sold literally by the pound, bundled into bales and shipped to soldiers in the field, sailors aboard ships, railroad workers, miners, farmers, and loggers–anywhere people (mostly male) were gathered, isolated, and hungry for reading matter. There, they were devoured, traded, and resold until they quite actually were “read to pieces,” the pulpy paper succumbing to over-handling. At a time when the literacy rate among the United States’ adult population was less than about twenty percent, it was a true literary happening.
Working parallel to the Beadle and Adams efforts also were “story papers,” or serial fiction, published on newsprint. Although some newspaper concerns–most notably The New York Herald–produced them, the unqualified leader in that industry was the house of Street and Smith, whose New York Weekly was closely watched for new installments by such writers as Ned Buntline and Prentiss Ingraham, among dozens of others. After each tale was brought to a conclusion in between five and ten weekly episodes, they were bound and sold as individual “novelettes,” also for ten cents, as part of “library” collections such as the Log Cabin Library or the People’s Library or the Lakeside Library. Again, they were collected, traded, resold, and worn out. Street and Smith would continue to produce what would ultimately be called “pulp fiction” until the mid-twentieth century.
Through such media, however, the western actually came into its own. Some scholars estimate that by the end of the 1860s, as many as half of the dime novels printed centered on stories of the frontier, a market share that would steadily grow to a point where more than seventy-five percent of dime novel production was set west of the Mississippi River. This was particularly true after the publication by Street and Smith of Buffalo Bill: The King of the Border Men; The Wildest and Truest Story I Ever Wrote, by Ned Buntline, in 1869. According to the story, Ned Buntline, en route from Sacramento to New York via the Transcontinental Railroad, de-trained at North Platte, Nebraska, where he found William Cody asleep and probably drunk under a wagon. He was referred to Cody by the local military commandant, who rebuffed Ned Buntline in his offer to write a novelette based on a recent Indian battle in which the commander had figured heroically. The officer told the intrepid dime novelist that he didn’t think it was dignified to participate and sent him instead to find a sometimes-scout named William F. Cody, who played a minor role in the fracas and, the commander figured, needed the money.
Ned Buntline did indeed find Cody. He dragged him out into the sunlight, made friends with him, and soon recreated him as “Buffalo Bill,” a common sobriquet applied to any number of foragers or scouts for the frontier army. Ned Buntline then packaged and sold Cody, buckskins, sombrero, Shaps rifle and Colt’s pistols, white horse, flowing golden locks and all to the American reading public. Since Daniel Boone and David Crockett, no frontiersman other than Kit Carson (About seventy titles were devoted to Carson between 1860 and 1890, as compared to more than 1,000 featuring Buffalo Bill in one way or another.) has ever captured so much of the American imagination or so closely embodied the western hero; but Carson’s life, real or imagined, was never so dramatic as Cody’s, and Carson never had the fortune to be discovered by a genuine western fiction writer, one who already had a national reputation as a successful and wildly popular author, one who was an expert at penning rapid, sensational popular fiction.
There’s no question that these mass produced tales of derring-do shaped the American vision of the West, promoted the concept of Manifest Destiny, and formed the mythology of the American frontier in the popular imagination. Some scholars suggest that George Armstrong Custer’s fondness for fringed buckskin and a broad plainsman’s headgear was inspired by his reading of Ned Buntline’s tale. So it’s fair to ask whether the West created the dime novel and its hero, or whether the dime novel created the West as we came to know it and as it came to know itself.
As a western hero, Buffalo Bill was the apotheosis, in flesh and blood, on stage and in an arena, of both the genteel characteristics of a Natty Bumppo or Daniel Boone and the frontier warrior leader characteristics of an Andy Jackson or Davy Crockett. An expert horseman, a crack shot, he was civil and well-mannered, solicitous of females, only ferocious in the cause of justice, and, as an expert hunter and scout, a good steward of the utopian ideals that the West seemed to offer in abundance. As an international star, he came to represent both the archetype and inspiration of the westerner. But the singular genius behind that icon’s creation was Ned Buntline, not William F. Cody, whose principal talents lay in his mastery of showmanship and cunning ability to surround himself with outstanding and fascinating people such as Sitting Bull, Annie Oakley, and others. Ned Buntline’s combination of Cody’s dramatized adventures with those of the notorious frontier gunfighter James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok made the complete story–adventure and action, certainly, but more importantly, a reinforcement of all that was good and right in civilization as it marched steadily onto the virgin land of the frontier. This formula moved the whole idea of the western story onto a new literary dimension.
The popularity of such fiction cannot be overstated, and there is no contemporary parallel. In time, the number of western dime novel titles being produced annually would be almost uncountable. Giants in the field such as Prentiss Ingraham (who would seize the Buffalo Bill franchise and make it his own, including ghost writing many of Cody’s supposed “autobiographies”) was credited with more than five hundred titles (although he probably wrote no more than two hundred, if that many) and Ned Buntline (actually, E.Z.C. Judson, who is credited with more than four hundred volumes, although he may have written more, although only a comparative handful were westerns) were joined or followed by writers such as Edward L. Wheeler who created “Deadwood Dick,” a model for such anti-heroic types as Zorro, Red Rider, and the Lone Ranger and countless “cast-out” heroes (unjustly ruined lawmen or soldiers, unfairly dispossessed ranchers or farmers, the misunderstood, maligned, and mishandled who refuse to forsake their basic values and commitments to goodness) struggle for justice from outside the law. Taken together, the frontiersman (or plainsman, more properly, in the post-war West), the outlaw, and the cowboy (a creation, again, of Prentiss Ingraham, who offered a volume based on the exploits of Buck Taylor, a cowboy in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and set up the heroic model for Owen Wister’s The Virginian), would come to form a literary trinity that would dominate western fiction for more than a century. In time, Calamity Jane, Belle Starr, Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, Texas Jack, Johnny Ringo, Black Bart, and dozens of other actual western figures would form the foundation for thousands of western tales ranging from the fanciful to the entirely fabricated; the basis for the twentieth-century western would be firmly established by the time the western motion picture arrived.
It’s not an accident, then, that probably the first sensational and widely distributed movie was a twelve-minute western, The Great Train Robbery (1903). Although it was shot in New Jersey, mostly, and relied heavily on a previously made British film, this “flicker” was the harbinger of a Hollywood staple that would dominate the industry within only few years. Borrowing heavily from the popular literary tradition, the American western movie of the thirties and forties and fifties and even into the sixties reinforced the same stereotypes established by Ned Buntline, Prentiss Ingraham, and Edward L. Wheeler a half-century before, refined as they were by Owen Wister, Zane Grey, Louis L’Amour, Elmore Leonard, and other more “literary minded” authors, including Laura Ingalls Wilder; and they exploited virtually the same formulaic plot lines. For more than seventy years, the film and the novel and western story worked side-by-side to complement one another, and all along the way, pulp writers (including the venerable Elmer Kelton) were grinding out more and more of the cheaply produced tales of the west, always expanding and developing more and more audience, eager, it seemed, for more and more of the same. By the mid-1960s, the television western had emerged to add to the momentum with its wildly successful series such as Gunsmoke and Bonanza, as well as several others; for the next twenty or twenty-five years, the western could claim its place next to the romance or crime or mystery novel as a major part if not the unquestioned primary thread of the American literary fabric.
So, what happened? Why has that fabric faded or, as some would aver, unraveled? Again, speculation is easier than probity on the issue, but one possibility is that the values and structures of those antique forms, however morphed and evolved and changed, have, like the dime novels themselves, simply worn out. A close look at the more celebrated western forms of the past quarter century, roughly, indicate that many are spoofs (Little Big Man, by Thomas Berger, i.e.) or that the western setting only offers a backdrop for a different kind of philosophical or literary inquiry (Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy, i.e., or even the darkly cynical Power in the Blood, by Greg Matthews). At the very least, the impact of historical revisionism and a demand for more factual accuracy, foiled as it’s been by a national squeamishness when it comes to matters that are not politically correct (extirpation of the Indian, subjugation of women, exploitation and destruction of the environment), has created an antipathy toward the celebration of the conquest of the frontier that turns people away from fictional heroics that may or may not have developed in the process.
Or it may be that there’s a sense of triumph evident in traditional western fiction that rings hollow today. As the nation struggles with globalization and the realization that history may well be moving past our own culture without respect for all we have done or planned yet to do, that looking backward into a period of time when all eyes were on the future may be a depressing prospect. It becomes hard to appreciate the zeal of the western pioneer who discovers the enormous potential in the virgin wilderness, in its unspoiled prairies, forests, and mountains and rivers when we sense that those resources may soon be as gone as the American bison, ruined or used up in less time than it took to find them. In a time when international affairs seem to be on our doorstep and limiting our dreams, it’s difficult to sympathize with a time when the contemplation of unknown wonders beyond a distant horizon seemed to be too much to imagine. In our present times when discouraging words have become a social litany, it’s just not possible to revel in consideration of a past land and a time where they were never heard.
In a way, such a phenomenon recalls the way the American reader turned away from the idealized heroics of Natty Bumppo or Old Ned and embraced the new heroic forms of the dime novel. Then, it was time for a new way of looking at things, time to put away the past with its colonialism, monarchies, and aristocratic structures and to stride confidently forward–into the sunset, as it were–into a realm of social utopia, armed with simply defined moral principles and firmly established democratic values that brooked no question and extolled the virtues of the common man and woman, the courage of the pioneer facing an unspoiled land. The western film has, for better worse, responded to the modern sensibility and its changes, but the western novel, generally, has not. For the most part, it wallows in antique perspectives that, for many people, are just no longer relevant.
Those writers who continue to exploit the stereotypes and formulaic plots of the past are, I think, contributing to this general malaise in western publishing. They literarily are beating a dead horse, rather than considering the advantages of more modern transport. Like the romance writers who never seem to run out of an audience for palpitating bosoms and flexing muscles, for beautiful and virginal heroines and handsome and virtuous heroes, regardless of the era, but who have gradually relaxed the restrictions on sexual content and explicit language, the westerners have continued to cater to those who would prefer to believe that Buffalo Bill was truly the “king of the border men,” or that Wild Bill actually was the “fastest gun in the West” and that neither was as vulgar and sometimes vile as he truly was. They don’t want to think of Calamity Jane or Bell Starr as prostitutes or Billy the Kid and Jesse James as stone killers. They want their myths reinforced, not clarified. But that audience is shrinking–or perhaps dying off–and the clamor for a more realistic and pragmatic approach to the study of who we are and who we might become seems to grow louder, at least among the literate population. We no longer are so ready to believe in white-hatted heroes or virtuous ranchers’ daughters, in the unimpeachable integrity of institutions such as churches, schools, governments, or justice systems. And we are, perhaps, no longer willing to accept that the answers to our problems, now and in the future, lie in the dreamy contemplation of some unknown frontier and the leadership of synthetic heroes.
It may well be, though, that the western, as a category, has “bottomed out.” If the last two lists for this volume are an indication, the apparent free-fall for the past several years may have slowed, perhaps stopped. It’s probably too early to say that it’s “bounced,” that the western is making a comeback. Indeed, it may never do that, at least not in present readers’ life times, but it may be that with the efforts of many of the writers who continue to try to broaden the scope of the genre, using the West less as metaphor and more as a real place with real lessons that can be valuable, that the audience for such fiction will gradually rejuvenate itself and demand more and higher quality writing from those who produce it.
Recommended Titles:
Black Rock Canon by Les Savage
The Canyon of Bones by Richard S. Wheeler
The German Bride by Joanna Hershon
Grub Line Rider by Louis L’Amour
Lost Trails by Louis L’Amour, Elmer Kelton, Loren D. Estleman, et al.
Luck by Max Brand
Names on a Map by Benjamin Alire Saenz
Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich
Pursuit by Vere Athanas
Shavetail by Thomas Cobb
Sun Going Down by Jack Todd
El Tigre by John H. Manhold
Trail of the Red Butterfly by Karl H. Schlesier
The Treasure of Nugget Mountain by Karl May
Winnetou the Apache Knight by Karl May
- Clay Reynolds is a Native Texan novelist and scholar, the author of more than eight hundred publications ranging from critical studies to short fiction, poems, essays, reviews and twelve published volumes. He holds academic degrees from the University of Texas at Austin, Trinity University, and the University of Tulsa. His published novels include The Vigil, Agatite, Franklin’s Crossing, Players, Monuments, and The Tentmaker. His most recent books are Ars Poetica and Threading the Needle. His nonfiction books include Stage Left: The Development of the American Social Drama, Taking Stock: A Larry McMurtry Casebook, A Hundred Years of Heroes: A Centennial History of the Southwestern Exposition and Livestock Show, Twenty Questions: Answers for the Inquiring Writer, and The Plays of Jack London. His novels, short fiction, and essays have won numerous awards, and he is a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow. He is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters and serves as professor of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas. His most recent work includes a collection of essays, Of Snakes and Sex and Playing in the Rain, and a collection of short fiction, Sandhill County Lines. Reynolds lives in Lowry Crossing, a community near McKinney, Texas, with his wife Judy, a Medical Technologist.
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