Paul Horgan's many novels and histories are not conventionally Western, but neither was Horgan a typical Westerner. He grew up in Buffalo, New York, where he was born on 1 August 1903, the second of three children of Edward Daniel and Rose Marie Rohr Horgan. Nor did Horgan stay in the West after 1960, when the opportunity came to affiliate with the Wesleyan Center for Advanced Studies in Middletown, Connecticut; he went there as a regular fellow, then took the directorship, and finally became permanent author-in-residence. Even during the thirty-one years Horgan lived in the West, his imagination was never much bound by it. His books are certainly Western, but they are refreshingly cosmopolitan--a quality that has helped to open the way for other writers of the region's literature.

Horgan went west with his family in 1915 because his father was suffering from tuberculosis and needed a dry climate such as that...