Howard Seely's books about Texas ranch life read as well today as they did when first published in the 19th century. Though not a Texan, Seely spent a lot of time there and captures the language and culture of the place with remarkable fidelity. The New York Times wrote of him: “Mr. Seely is not native to Texas, at least not to a Texas ranch. He is college-bred [Yale] and through his writings runs constant evidence of his Eastern culture. But he has deep sympathy with ranch life, and this sympathy the reader feels to be something more than the sympathy that is natural to a studious observer of manners and customs. Beneath the outer aspects of men as trained to the saddle and armed with ‘shooting irons,’ he sees the human nature that dominates and inspires every incident of daily life.” Seely's fiction was popular in its day and is now available for a new audience in ebook format. Be sure to LOOK INSIDE by clicking the cover above or download a sample.

The cowboy, America’s most popular folk hero, appeals to millions of readers of novels, histories, biographies, and folk tales. Cowboys command a vast audience on country radio, television, and at the movies, but what exactly is a cowboy? Authors Joe B. Frantz and Julian Ernest Choate, Jr., reveal the real, dyed-in-the-wool cowboy as a heroic being from the American past, who richly deserves to be understood in terms of reality, instead of myth. Here, then, is the definitive portrait of the American cowboy—in frontier history and in literature—reexamined, revitalized, and set in the proper perspective. Many exciting accounts of cowboy life have been presented by such talented writers as J. Evetts Haley, J. Frank Dobie, Wayne Gard, Walter Prescott Webb, Edward Everett Dale, Helena Huntington Smith, Ramon F. Adams, and C. L. Sonnichsen. But Frantz and Choate see the cowboy in relation to the entire panorama of western history and as part of a continuing tradition: “The American cowboy has carved a niche—niche nothing, it’s a gorge—in American affection as a folk hero, and in this role we have surveyed him.” The American Cowboy: The Myth and the Reality is illustrated with sixteen pages of the great cowboy photographs made more than a century ago by Erwin E. Smith.

As the railroads opened up the American West to settlers in the last half of the 19th Century, the Plains Indians made their final stand and cattle ranches spread from Texas to Montana. Eminent Western author Dee Brown here illuminates the struggle between these three groups as they fought for a place in this new landscape. The result is both a spirited national saga and an authoritative historical account of the drive for order in an uncharted wilderness, illustrated throughout with maps, photographs and ephemera from the period.