Recommendations
Books Like Butcher's Crossing
If you liked Williams's anti-Western, these books share its refusal of frontier romanticism and clinical attention to violence in nature
Butcher's Crossing (1960) by John Williams is his second novel — an anti-Western about a Harvard graduate who joins a buffalo hunting expedition into a remote Colorado valley in 1873. Williams uses Western conventions to critique frontier romanticism with clinical physical precision.
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Buy on AmazonStoner
by John Williams
Williams's companion mature masterwork — showing where the anti-romantic vision of Butcher's Crossing arrived in its most celebrated and refined form.
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Buy on AmazonNothing But the Night
by John Williams
Williams's companion debut — showing the earlier more psychologically intense form of Williams's spare literary vision.
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Buy on AmazonAugustus
by John Williams
Williams's companion National Book Award — showing Williams's vision applied to historical fiction and the distant past.
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Buy on AmazonBlood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy's companion great American novel about the violence of the frontier — the companion in the tradition of the American literary Western that refuses romanticism.
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Buy on AmazonA River Runs Through It
by Norman Maclean
Maclean's companion great American literary account of fly fishing in Montana — the companion about the encounter with nature that is both deeply personal and critical of romantic mythology.
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Buy on AmazonDeath Comes for the Archbishop
by Willa Cather
Cather's companion great American novel about the Southwest as a spiritual and moral space rather than just a setting.
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Buy on AmazonThe Son
by Philipp Meyer
Meyer's companion great multigenerational Texas novel about the relationship between settlers and Comanche — the companion about the frontier's moral costs.
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Buy on AmazonLonesome Dove
by Larry McMurtry
McMurtry's companion Pulitzer Western about a cattle drive — the companion in the tradition of the American literary Western that uses the conventions of the genre to make them complex.
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