Butcher's Crossing
1960 · 274 pages
Full of Emerson, a Harvard student goes west and finances a buffalo hunt into a hidden Colorado valley. The killing lasts weeks, the winter shuts them in, and nature stops being a consolation.
★ 5.8
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Angle of Repose
1971 · 672 pages
From his wheelchair a historian rebuilds his grandmother's life from her letters: a New York illustrator who followed a mining engineer west. Stegner's Pulitzer novel holds a region in one marriage.
★ 6.0
True Grit
1968 · 235 pages
Mattie Ross, fourteen and a relentless Presbyterian bargainer, hires a one-eyed, hard-drinking marshal to hunt the man who shot her father. Portis gives her the funniest, most unbudging voice in American fiction.
★ 6.5
All the Pretty Horses
1992 · 302 pages
Sixteen years old and landless, John Grady Cole rides into Mexico in 1949 and finds work breaking horses on a great hacienda. McCarthy writes horses and hard country better than any American novelist.
★ 6.8
Lonesome Dove
1985 · 858 pages
Two aging Texas Rangers drive cattle from the Rio Grande to Montana, one talking constantly and one saying nothing. McMurtry gives the whole crew interior lives, then lets the trail take them.
★ 6.9
A River Runs Through It and Other Stories
1976 · 240 pages
In our family, Maclean writes, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. Two brothers and their minister father on the Big Blackfoot, and a love that cannot save anyone.
★ 6.9
Blood Meridian
1985 · 337 pages
Scalp hunters ride the Mexican border in 1849, among them a runaway Tennessee boy and the hairless giant Judge Holden. McCarthy writes the violence in Old Testament prose and never once looks away.
★ 9.1