Ep. 41: Favorite Books About the West | The American West
episodePreviously titled “Ep. 41: Favorite Books About the West” — renamed by the publisher on Sep 15, 2026
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What is the historical context for books about the American West introduced at the start of the episode?
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The West and his stories have been rendered in many ways, some of which I've made an effort to address in this podcast. In the deep past there's archaeology and paleontology, which is how we know about the Clovis people or the Collapse of the Chaco and Empire. Are woolly mammoths and darwolves as part of the West disappeared beast sharing? There's ethnology and anthropology and folklore which have preserved our oldest western literature in the form of the coyote stories. And have told us a great deal about Western cultures, native or not. The visual arts, which I've addressed several times, gave the world our first visual impressions of the West and interpreted the frontier. Photography followed to capture a West that intrigues us because it looks less like our West than we'd expect.
But as for history, literary fiction, and poetry, literary art is the form of books about the West, and there are so many, and that allows us to experience the past, present, and future of this region in ways no other way of knowing can do. Except of course for Western movies, which we'll take up in the next episode of the American West. The truth is that even among a group of PhD Western historians, no hour-long discussion is going to probe some ultimate resolved truth about which are the best books on a subject as vast as the American West. All we can do here is offer up to listeners and viewers a tiny sample of our personal favorites and explain why we're advancing these above all the other possibilities.
Our street cred for this exercise probably rests primarily on this reality. We have all been voracious readers of books about the West for a long time and have also taught university courses that were steeped in information from books. I'm gonna go last with my own choices, but I'll start this out with a quick exercise that will give you some idea of the literary possibilities when you take on a subject like the American West and literature. The last time I taught a graduate class in the history of the West at the University of Montana was in the fall of twenty thirteen. I'd organized the bibliography of books on the West I handed out to the PhD and MA students in that class into 14 subfields. I looked at them again the other day.
Here's how they broke down and how many books I listed in each subheading. First was overviews of the West. There were forty-six titles in that one. The Native West through the early 20th century, 123 titles. Western Exploration and Imperialism, 77 titles. The first extractive economy, the fur trade, got 40 titles. Understanding the West through science and art in the 19th century, 43 titles. Frontier Extraction, Mining and Logging, 60 titles. Settler Societies Farming and Ranching the West, 76 titles. Class, Ethnicity, and Gender in the West, 112 titles. Western Infrastructure and the West of the City, 68 titles. History of the Western Environment, 104 different titles. Contemporary West Tourism Politics and Modern Indian.
115 titles, modern Western issues like water, power, the economies of the New West, 46 titles, a Western sense of place as expressed in art and film, 97 titles, and a Western sense of place expressed in history and literature, 81 titles. The calculator on my phone tells me that's one thousand eighty eight books. I haven't kept list this complete in the past decade, but the number of high quality books like these on the West, released by top New York publishing houses or university presses putting manuscripts through peer review has probably doubled by now. Choosing, in other words, is not going to be easy.
Dan, welcome back. It's great to be with you as always.
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Chapters
3 chapters
1
What is the historical context for books about the American West introduced at the start of the episode?
0:00–9:33
2
How does host Dan introduce guest Dr. Sara Dant and her expertise on Western history?
9:33–34:41
3
Which books does Sara recommend for understanding the myth and reality of the West, starting with Wallace Stegner’s collection?
34:41–1:02:36