Writers of nonfiction spend countless hours researching, but few are as dedicated about it as historical novelist James Alexander Thom. Not only...
Writing with Cold Feet
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Western Books & Movies
James Drury, Alias The Virginian
When Owen Wister published The Virginian in 1902, he created the quintessential fictional Western hero (more than 60 years before Clint Eastwood...
Black Humor
The real Baxter Black is as witty off stage as when performing. One phone conversation can prove it. But being a Western humorist isn’t only what he...
Wes Studi
Santa Fe and Hollywood are a long way from Nofire Hollow, Oklahoma, but Cherokee actor Wes Studi has found a home in all three worlds. Many critics...
The Quiet Montanan
Anyone who can write about mining towns and mountain men with the same passion he puts into tales of the California gold rush or early Oregon must...
The Hole-In-The-Wall Nickelodeon
The Hole-in-the-Wall filmography includes the original, the prequels, the sequels and the non sequiturs. •Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969):...
A Writer Who Speaks for the Dead
You have to relish a writer who describes Benjamin Franklin as an 18th-century Groucho Marx. Lucia St. Clair Robson is not only one of America’s...
Frontier House
Could a 21st-century family survive in 1883 Montana? That’s the question PBS tried to answer in its excellent six-hour Frontier House, a WNET...
He’s Hung Up His Gun and Badge but James Arness is Still the Marshal
Since 1955, he has towered above all Western lawmen—at least those on television. That’s not just because James Arness, better known as Marshal...
Mike Blakely
Roping, riding and writing—that’s a typical day for Mike Blakely, one of the fastest rising stars in Western fiction. Lately the fourth “R,”...
King of Texas
In the new TNT Western movie King of Texas, rancher John Lear has an ego about as big as the newly formed Republic of Texas. He tells his three...
The Alamo In the Movies
To say that Alamo movies are historically inaccurate is a bit like saying that Godzilla is a tad green and scaly. Most filmmakers couldn’t care less...