The American West is a land that has inspired novelists since the early 1800s. Western fiction covers a vast geographic, cultural, and thematic landscape and includes the real cowboy narrative of Will James, the formula Westerns of Max Brand and Frank Gruber, the romantic novels of Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour, the Navajo mysteries of Tony Hillerman, the ethnic novels of Louise Erdrich, the contemporary novels of Edward Abbey, and the genuine literature of Willa Cather and Wallace Stegner. "Chasing the Sun" is a reader's guide with over 1,350 entries, including 59 reviews of the author's personal favorites. It is organized around content-exploration, trapping, wagon trains, the Indian Wars, contemporary fiction, and so on. Each chapter, or category, has an introduction, a reader's guide that provides capsule summaries of the literature from some of the earliest novels to current publications, and reviews of one or more novels in that category. The guide is for general readers who like their fiction set in the American West, and it will also provide a ready source for researchers, reviewers and students interested in a particular type of novel set in the West, for example, the decimation of the buffalo herds. It is ideal for those readers who would like to compare novels with the same general subject by different writers, and those who would like a taste of the quality and diversity of the literature through the reviews. It should also help teachers identify books notable enough to add to a syllabus.
