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Elmore Leonard: Westerns

Last Stand at Saber River | Hombre | Valdez Is Coming | Forty Lashes Less One | eight short stories More

Edited by Terrence Rafferty

Temporarily out of stock, but more copies are on the way and are expected to arrive in our warehouse the week of February 24.

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents

Overview

News By popular demand: Our Great American Western book and movie recommendations
April 19, 2021

Video The Great American Western on Page and Screen
April 1, 2021

News Coming attractions: LOA hits the trail, rounds up four classics in The Western
August 5, 2019

One of the great storytellers of our time, Elmore Leonard began his career writing Westerns, a genre he loved. In the pages of pulp magazines that were still flourishing in the 1950s—Argosy, Dime Western Magazine, Zane Grey’s Western, and others—he perfected his trademark style, a blend of wiry tautness, sharp characterizations, and jolts of unexpected humor. Now, writer and film critic Terrence Rafferty has gathered the best of Leonard’s Westerns in a single volume, four classic novels and eight outstanding short stories, including the tales that inspired such powerful films as Hombre, Valdez Is Coming, and 3:10 to Yuma.

In Last Stand at Saber River (1959), Leonard spins a tight narrative in which a homecoming Confederate veteran must fight to regain the ranch that has been stolen from him. Set, like most of Leonard’s Westerns, against a stark Arizona landscape, the novel is a masterpiece of unbroken tension, as the hero confronts a violent new war for all he holds dear.

Chosen as one of the twenty-five greatest Western novels by the Western Writers of America, and the basis for a classic film starring Paul Newman, Hombre (1961) is a stagecoach drama whose hero, a man raised by Apaches, is treated with contempt by the white settlers who will ultimately depend on him for their survival.

Valdez Is Coming (1970), Leonard’s favorite among his Westerns, pits Mexican American town constable Bob Valdez against the entrenched power of frontier oligarch Frank Tanner. When Valdez is maneuvered by Tanner into shooting an innocent man, he launches a one-man war for justice for the man’s widow that culminates with a surprising twist.

With Forty Lashes Less One (1972) Leonard explores the comic tone that would mark his later books. Set within the harsh confines of Yuma Territorial Prison, the novel recounts the unlikely friendship of two prisoners—one part Apache, the other African American—planning a near-impossible escape.

Like the novels, the eight stories included here, are tough, suspenseful, convincing, and beautifully spare in style. They range from Leonard’s first published pulp story, “Trail of the Apache” (1951), to one of his last, the fascinating character study “The Tonto Woman” (1982). Among the others are the twice-filmed “Three-Ten to Yuma” (1953) and “The Captives” (1955), the novella that inspired the acclaimed film The Tall T.

Terrence Rafferty, editor, is the author of The Thing Happens: Ten Years of Writing About the Movies (1993). His writing on books, film, and popular culture has appeared in many publications, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times. He has taught comparative literature at Cornell, film criticism at Columbia, and writing and American Studies at Princeton.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
News & Views

News By popular demand: Our Great American Western book and movie recommendations
April 19, 2021

Video The Great American Western on Page and Screen
April 1, 2021

News Coming attractions: LOA hits the trail, rounds up four classics in The Western
August 5, 2019

Interviews Terrence Rafferty: Elmore Leonard’s West is “an idea of the West”
June 25, 2018

News | Story of the Week Flashback: When Elmore Leonard, a “rising young writer of Western novels,” debuted (sort of) in The New Yorker
May 3, 2018
Table of Contents

Last Stand at Saber River
Hombre
Valdez Is Coming
Forty Lashes Less One

Stories
Trail of the Apache
The Rustlers
Three-Ten to Yuma
Blood Money
The Captives
The Nagual
The Kid
The Tonto Woman

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-562-4 781 pages

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N° 308 Library of America Series

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