A master practitioner's view of his craft, this classic survey of the fiction of the American West is part literary history, part criticism, and entertaining throughout. The first edition of <i>The Wister Trace</i> was published in 1987, when Larry McMurtry had just reinvented himself as a writer of Westerns and Cormac McCarthy's career had not yet taken off. Loren D. Estleman's long-overdue update connects these new masters with older writers, assesses the genre's past, present, and future, and takes account of the renaissance of western movies, as well.
