skopia
Avedon spent five years photographing drifters, miners, waitresses, and slaughterhouse workers against plain white paper. Printed larger than life, the faces leave nothing to hide behind and no cowboy myth standing.
Twenty-three and fresh from Harvard, Parkman rode onto the 1846 prairie and spent three weeks hunting buffalo with an Oglala Sioux band. He got the West down before the railroads reached it.
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.
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.
Alexandra Bergson inherits her father's failing Nebraska claim and mortgages it to buy more land while the neighbors give up and leave. Cather made the American prairie a landscape fit for epic.
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.
Seventeen days on a motorcycle carry a father and son from Minnesota to California while he works out what Quality means and recovers the man he was before electroshock erased him.
Jim Burden arrives orphaned in Nebraska and finds Antonia Shimerda, an immigrant girl whose family is barely surviving the winter. Cather writes the prairie so well the book reads like your own childhood.