Six Brilliant Reads: Literary Westerns

25 August 2026

Westerns aren’t always only about gunslingers and feuds, posses and cattle rusting. The best explore the complexities of human nature, show the survival of its characters in a challenging wilderness as well as creating an engrossing sense of time and place. Some fall into the category labelled “literary westerns”, and here are six that bring the wild west to life.

Many of Cormac McCarthy’s epic novels have made it to the big screen. All the Pretty Horses is the first of the author’s Border Trilogy, and it describes the coming of age of John Cole in the vanishing old west, as he heads for Mexico in search the life he has always dreamed for himself. The story is described as both beautiful and brutal, a kind of requiem for the American frontier.

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick de Witt is a humorous novel about two gunslingers hired by a frontier baron known as the Commodore to track down and kill a prospector. The journey of the brothers Eli and Charlie from Oregon to San Francisco includes a raft of quirky encounters and difficulties as Eli begins to question what he does for a living. The Sisters Brothers was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2011 and made into a movie in 2018.

My Antonia was first published in 1918 and is the third volume in Willa Cather’s Prairie Trilogy, each focusing on a strong female protagonist. This novel follows the experiences of an immigrant girl from Bohemia, taking her to the Nebraska plains, as told by her childhood friend, Jim. The novel is considered Cather’s masterpiece for bringing the American west to life, and told in beautiful prose.

Brokeback Mountain is a collection of stories by Annie Proulx, the titular story following two Wyoming ranch hands who form an intense and unexpected relationship when hired for a seasonal job looking after sheep. Meeting in the 1960s, their lives diverge and reconnect in the years that follow, the story describing a conflict that arises in such a traditionally masculine world. Another book made into a movie, with the big Wyoming skies on show.

News of the World by Paulette Jiles follows the journey of itinerant news reader Jefferson Kidd in the aftermath of the Civil War, who is asked to deliver a young Kiowa girl back to her people in San Antonio – people she can scarcely remember. It’s a long 400-mile journey through difficult and dangerous terrain, the girl reluctant at first to be transported slowly developing trust for Jefferson.

Mary Doria Russell’s novel Doc brings in those famous gunslingers of the west, Doc Holliday and law-enforcer Wyatt Earp and fleshes out the stories of their background and their friendship. The two men couldn’t be more different – Doc born to the life of a Southern gentleman, now a gambler battling TB; Wyatt the stern and fearless lawman in the days leading up to the infamous gunfight at the O.K. Corral. A second book, Epitaph, focuses on Wyatt’s story.

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