While I worked on my MFA and the writing of my master’s thesis (WRANGLE, a novel based on Texas quarter horse racing) I also immersed myself in the best of the literary westerns published over the years. And that was a challenge—because there are not many of those.

To look back in time, the West was a rough-and-tumble place while the East was focusing on becoming the intellectual and art center of the country. Eastern critics looked down on western authors, and their poor writing standards. The western literary world closed rank and held themselves to authenticity—not some East coast puffery.

To this day, there are few great western writers who make it in to the canon; none who have ever won a Nobel prize; only a handful with the Pulitzer or other major awards. Willa Cather wrote of the western frontier and earned a Pulitzer for One of Ours, but I found her writing stilted—confined by the mores of the late 1800s. Wallace Stegner is considered the grandfather of western literary works, but I found his Pulitzer-winning Angle of Repose a slow and difficult read.

Larry McMurtry won the Pulitzer for Lonesome Dove, and it was a good example of western grit and twang. I much preferred the more sophisticated writing of Cormac McCarthy, but he only won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for All the Pretty Horses (part of the Border Trilogy). It was his post-apolyptic novel The Road that earned him the Pulitzer.

It was always a tough decision for modern western writers—aim their book toward literary standards and maybe they would find a publisher and readers—or write for that more available market of rural fans. In my research, I did find some novelists that were determined to write art.

Ivan Doig focused on the immigrant working class who absorbed into the west (loved his trilogy: English Creek, Rascal Fair, and Ride with Me, Mariah Montana). Kent Haruf’s Plainsong was all heart, following the interlocking stories of the inhabitants of a Colorado town. James Galvin’s The Meadow captured the challenges and failures of life in an unforgiving land. Annie Proulx’s work (Close Range, Wyoming Stories) is an unsentimental (and sometimes humorous) look at the west.

This skewed western market continues into the present day, as we lose 3-4 million acres a year of farmland. Those who write about the west, those who sell the books, continue to focus on preserving the history of the west in both fictional and non-fictional accounts.

My own experience reflected this dynamic. In 2014 when I submitted WRANGLE for consideration for a Will Rogers Medallion Award, they tagged the novel as a Western Romance. I suppose it is – about the love of Texans for the quarter horse and the love of two main characters—so I took no issue with the category.

What I found of interest was the reason for my win—not for any literary quality—but as the main judge explained to me, I had captured an important “myth of the west.”

JONNIE MARTIN

[Art by Getty Images for Unsplash]