The Last Cowboy

A biography of the legendary professional football coach, known for his trademark fedora, who spent almost thirty years taking the Dallas Cowboys from punchline to NFL glory, ultimately delivering twenty consecutive winning seasons.

In this romantic, humorous and harrowing novel, the acclaimed author of Make Believe Love returns to the epic skies and straight roads of Broken Head, Saskatchewan, and takes us into a very modern Western. Sam McMahon can’t understand why his banker colleagues in Toronto keep calling him “cowboy,” when he prefers opera to C&W and fine wine to beer. Sam’s wife is in love with his brother Vern, who has followed the family tradition and works their parents’ farm, a mixed cattle and crop operation inherited from his grandfather, Old Sam. When his wife leaves him stranded by the side of a Saskatchewan highway, Sam is rescued by a woman, Ai Lee, in a rented Toyota. Ai is a film location scout who’s searching for the perfect cliff for legendary director James Aspen’s new film, The Last Cowboy. Thirty years previously, Old Sam dreams of better days in an older West, mending fences, riding horses, raising cattle. To save young Sam, then 10 years old, from what he considers the malaise of the late-20th century, Old Sam drags him off into a blizzard on horseback. His goal is to save a lost cow and her new calf, which may or may not exist. Sam’s parents fear he’ll only manage to kill his grandson. When, only days later, the old cowboy wanders out of doors without his parka in the freezing cold, muttering about a lost boy, he’s rescued by a Native couple out in a “borrowed” car, who run afoul of the police and end up driving into their final sunset. When Ai hears their story from Sam, she thinks she’s found her perfect location. The Last Cowboy does much more than update the Western; it weaves together stories and generations and unveils, with beauty and compassion, the leap or fall that awaits us all. So I stretch back in permanent recline and do my best to travel off to a better day, a summer day back fifty years past, a few days after a big rain, so that everything was green except for the cuts in the draws where the runoff had chewed right through the grass. There was a glow to the world back then that has long since been lost. It is painfully elusive, that particular luminescence, but I sit here stubbornly trying to restore the shine of it. I begin with a sky that was as blue as the better skies now, and work my way down to the green, only a breath of a line of white dividing the earth from the heavens. -- from The Last Cowboy

'The West that Henry mourned belonged to the Western movie, where the land and the cattle went to their proper guardians and brought a fortune in respect and power. It was a West where the best cowboy got to shoot the meanest outlaw, woo the prettiest schoolteacher, bed her briefly to produce sons, and then ignore her for the finer company of other cowboys - a West as sentimental and as brutal as the people who made a virtue of that curious combination of qualities and called it the American experience. ' From the Introduction Henry Blanton is the 'last cowboy' of Jane Kramer's classic portrait, the failed hero of his own mythology, the man who ends an era for himself. His story - his flawed, funny, and in the end tragic efforts to be a proper cowboy, 'expressin' right' in a world where the range is a feed yard and college boys run ranches from air-conditioned Buicks -is the story of a country coming of age in great promise and greater disappointment. A hundred and fifty miles up the highway from agri-business Amarillo, Henry claimed the extravagant prerogatives of a free man on a horse. He rode his own frontier, decked out in his vigilance and his honour, until the shocking moment when in the person of Henry Blanton the West and the Western had a showdown.

Leroy Webb represents the vanishing era of the open-range cowboy. For six decades he has rounded up, roped, chased, wrestled, and cajoled cattle while riding over vast ranchlands and sleeping under the stars in New Mexico and Texas. Besides tackling the daily back-breaking chores of the cowboy, he has tirelessly worked to breed, train, and show horses while keeping up with the rodeo circuit. And despite frequent moves from ranch to ranch, his devotion to family has remained unquestioned. He may not have filled his pockets with the life he chose, but his heart is filled with riches.

"A can't-put-it-down modern Western." —Kirk Siegler, NPR Longlisted for the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing The Last Cowboys is Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter John Branch’s epic tale of one American family struggling to hold on to the fading vestiges of the Old West. For generations, the Wrights of southern Utah have raised cattle and world-champion saddle-bronc riders—many call them the most successful rodeo family in history. Now they find themselves fighting to save their land and livelihood as the West is transformed by urbanization, battered by drought, and rearranged by public-land disputes. Could rodeo, of all things, be the answer? Written with great lyricism and filled with vivid scenes of heartache and broken bones, The Last Cowboys is a powerful testament to the grit and integrity that fuel the American Dream.

In the world of Western films, Randolph Scott, Joel McCrea, and Audie Murphy have frequently been overlooked in favor of names like Roy Rogers and John Wayne. Yet these three actors played a crucial role in the changing environment of the post–World War II Western, and, in the process, made many excellent middle-budget films that are still a pleasure to watch. This account of these three Western stars’ careers begins in 1946, when Scott and McCrea committed themselves to the Western roles they would play for nearly twenty years. Murphy, who also joined them in 1946, would continue his Western career for a few years after his cohorts rode into the film sunset. Arranged chronologically, and balanced among the three actors, the text concludes with Audie Murphy’s last Western in 1967. Covering both the personal and professional lives of these three Hollywood cowboys, the book provides both their stories and the story of a Hollywood whose attitude toward the Western was in a time of transition and transformation. The text is complemented by 60 photographs and a filmography for each of the three.

Two rodeo stars get a second chance at high school love when they meet again on a California ranch in a romance by the New York Times bestselling author. Ry Morgan has always had a thing for Avery Hayes—one more hope his twin wrecked for him, kissing her at the high school prom while pretending to be Ry. Eight years later, Ry has had enough: he’s quitting the pro rodeo circuit, moving home to California to mend fences, and letting his brother clean up his own messes for a change. Reclaiming Avery’s stolen kiss is at the top of his agenda. But Avery isn’t the girl she used to be. At the height of her rodeo career, a bad fall left Avery lucky to be alive, let alone walking. Between surgeries and fighting off everybody’s pity, she hasn’t been on a horse since. Ry is strong, confident, and sexy as hell—exactly what she thought she wanted at seventeen. Now, she’ll have to protect the safe space she’s made for herself—or risk it all for a dream she thought would never come again. “If you love cowboys—and who doesn’t—you’ll love the Morgans!” --Cora Seton, New York Times bestselling author on The Reluctant Cowboy

Will James has been dead for more than two decades, but the books that flowed so prolifically from his pen, and his great gift as painter and illustrator, still keep his name perpetually alive. James' writing, either in fiction, or serious study, possessed the vernacular and earthy grain of the cow-camp and the sweep and flavor of the open range. From the first word he ever wrote for publication, from the first sketch he ever produced, rings the authenticity of a man who truly has known the West. There is no doubt that Will James was the cowboy genius. But, since his untimely death in 1942, every attempt to run down the facts of life pertaining to this taciturn and silent novelist and artist, has met with failure on the part of the biographer. His Lone Cowboy, universally accepted as the autobiography of Will James, has just as universally fell apart when placed under the glass of scholarly scrutiny. The day Will James died, the riddle of Will James alive was as poignantly real as the day his first novel or first illustration appeared. To ferret out the story of the real Will James, Anthony Amaral emerges as a literary detective of the highest order. But the real story of the real Will James, as told in this remarkable biography, rivals any novel ever to come from the facile pen of James himself. While its candid portrayal will shock and surprise many who imagined they knew the Will James story, it in no way undermines the man's intrinsic greatness in the field of art and letters. Honest and understanding in the handling of the great revealment, Anthony Amaral has not sacrificed scholarship in telling the exciting story of this man's life -- Book jacket.