Elmer Kelton, Prolific Western Novelist, Dies at 83
Elmer Kelton, a novelist who brought the sensibility of the old-style western to bear on a modern Texas landscape of oil fields and financially troubled ranches, died on Aug. 22 in San Angelo, Tex. He was 83.
He died of multiple causes, said his wife, Anna.
Mr. Kelton personified the term “regional writer,” at least insofar as his work focused on a particular place.
He wrote more than 60 books — including the text for a number of art books by western artists — virtually all of them infused with the dusty open spaces and hardscrabble values of west Texas, where he was born and spent most of his life. And among aficionados of the western genre he was a venerated figure, perhaps not in the same league with the all-time best sellers Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey, but generally perceived as a more skillful writer. He was not infrequently included by critics in the literary wing of the genre, along with authors like Larry McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy.
“He would be the modern L’Amour in terms of popularity, but he transcended the genre the way McMurtry did,” said Paul A. Hutton, distinguished professor of history at the University of New Mexico and executive director of the Western Writers of America, a guild and advocacy group. In 1995 the organization’s membership voted Mr. Kelton the greatest western writer of all time.
Mr. Kelton’s novels were set in many eras of the past and occasionally the present, all of them underscoring the workingman’s dignity of the cowboy, which he treated as a category of man rather than a specific profession. His protagonists were as likely to be oil-field workers, handymen or Texas Rangers as ranchers, and though they weren’t perfect — in fact they were often hugely flawed — he always imbued them with natural competence, self-sufficiency and self-respect.
“Next to his way with a horse, a cowboy was proudest of his independence,” he wrote in “The Day the Cowboys Quit,” a 1971 novel set during a ranch-hand strike in 1883. “He worked for other men, but they owned nothing of him except his time. He was a free soul. He could ride from the Rio Grande to the Powder River and seldom see a fence. He could start that ride with five dollars in his pocket and have three left when he finished, if that was the way he wanted to travel. Money did not rule him.”
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He died of multiple causes, said his wife, Anna.
Mr. Kelton personified the term “regional writer,” at least insofar as his work focused on a particular place.
He wrote more than 60 books — including the text for a number of art books by western artists — virtually all of them infused with the dusty open spaces and hardscrabble values of west Texas, where he was born and spent most of his life. And among aficionados of the western genre he was a venerated figure, perhaps not in the same league with the all-time best sellers Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey, but generally perceived as a more skillful writer. He was not infrequently included by critics in the literary wing of the genre, along with authors like Larry McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy.
“He would be the modern L’Amour in terms of popularity, but he transcended the genre the way McMurtry did,” said Paul A. Hutton, distinguished professor of history at the University of New Mexico and executive director of the Western Writers of America, a guild and advocacy group. In 1995 the organization’s membership voted Mr. Kelton the greatest western writer of all time.
Mr. Kelton’s novels were set in many eras of the past and occasionally the present, all of them underscoring the workingman’s dignity of the cowboy, which he treated as a category of man rather than a specific profession. His protagonists were as likely to be oil-field workers, handymen or Texas Rangers as ranchers, and though they weren’t perfect — in fact they were often hugely flawed — he always imbued them with natural competence, self-sufficiency and self-respect.
“Next to his way with a horse, a cowboy was proudest of his independence,” he wrote in “The Day the Cowboys Quit,” a 1971 novel set during a ranch-hand strike in 1883. “He worked for other men, but they owned nothing of him except his time. He was a free soul. He could ride from the Rio Grande to the Powder River and seldom see a fence. He could start that ride with five dollars in his pocket and have three left when he finished, if that was the way he wanted to travel. Money did not rule him.”