The Good Old Boys by Elmer Kelton.
The Smiling Country by Elmer Kelton.
These books and others by San Angelo western writer Elmer Kelton embody the West Texas I knew growing up and the West Texas I heard about from my grandparents and others, far better than the hugely popular book, Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. I suppose comparisons are odious, but in this case I’ll make an exception. I thought the characters in Lonesome Dove were neither likable nor believable, but Hewey Calloway, although I certainly didn’t always agree with his decisions, was understandable and convincing and characteristic of the kind of men I saw and heard about in West Texas when I was growing up. Good old boys.
Hewey Calloway wants to stay a free and somewhat irresponsible cowboy. But life and changing times seem to be pushing him in another direction: settling down. Both of these books, The Good Old Boys and The Smiling Country, are about Hewey and his ongoing battle with himself and with the outside world to remain free and independent and also to make connections and conquer his own loneliness. Can he have love and family and also maintain his liberty and his allegiance to his own code of conduct?
At first, it seems that he cannot have both. Hewey must choose, and in The Good Old Boys, he does. Then, as happens to most of us, even the most independent and ornery, life and circumstances begin to narrow Hewey’s choices until it seems as if he can have neither the freewheeling life of a cowboy nor the comfort of home and family.In The Smiling Country, Hewey confronts his inability to stop time and change, and he realizes his own limitations and the isolation that his choices have imposed upon him. And yet, he also has made good choices that bring him friendship and support the he needs it the most.
Elmer Kelton was the farm-and-ranch editor for the San Angelo Standard-Times. Also, for five years he was editor of Sheep and Goat Raiser Magazine, and for another twenty-two years he was editor of Livestock Weekly. He wrote more than thirty western novels, set mostly in Texas, and he was awarded several Spur Awards from the Western Writers of America. In 1977, Kelton received an Owen Wister Award for lifetime achievement, and in 1998, he received the first Lone Star Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Larry McMurtry Center for Arts and Humanities at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas.
I highly recommend Elmer Kelton’s western novels if you are at all interested in the genre, and even if you are not. There’s a smattering of language, and the cowboys are not all pure, (but they are much more honorable than McMurtry’s Gus and Call and Jake and whoever else figures in that rather dis-honorable novel). I would suggest that you read both books together to get the whole story of good old by, Hewey Calloway.
The Buckskin Line by Elmer Kelton.