The author's essays on the West and his admiration of other writers.

Acclaimed literary biographer Roy Morris carefully sorts fact from fiction to tell the story of a young genius finding his voice in the ramshackle mining camps, boomtowns, and newspaper offices of the wild and woolly West, while the Civil War rages half a continent away.

Over the past decade a rich chorus of women's voices has emerged from the West. The Stories That Shape Us is an extraordinary anthology of twenty-six personal essays by contemporary women writers, many being published here for the first time. Ranging widely across the cultures and the regions of the West, these women relate stories of family and community, of race and gender, of commitment and displacement, of grief and repair, of spirituality and...