First published in 1899, this graphic depiction of urban American life centers around its title character, McTeague, a dentist practicing in San Francisco at the turn of the century. While at first content with his life and friendship with an ambitious man named Marcus, McTeague eventually courts and marries Trina, a frugal young woman who wins a large sum of money in a lottery. The greed of the majority of the characters in the novel creates a chain...

"Unabashedly sentimental, this has some stunning scenes and a rhythm as smooth as a slow canter. And Old Jake, symbol of the best of the old West, leaves some indestructible memories."-Kirkus Reviews

The experiences of a mouse-colored horse from his birth in the wild, through his capture by humans and his work in the rodeo and on the range, to his eventual old age.

"More than a history of Western movies, The American West on Film intertwines film history, the history of the American West, and American social history into one unique volume"--

Excerpt: "[Lumbermen] are in such a hurry to get rich that they'll leave their grandchildren a desert. They cut and slash in every direction, and then fires come and the country is ruined. Our rivers depend upon the forests for water. The trees draw the rain; the leaves break it up and let it fall in mists and drippings; it seeps into the ground, and is held by roots. If the trees are destroyed the rain rushes off on the surface and floods the rivers....

The Virginian is a 1902 debut novel set in the Wild West by the American novelist Owen Wister. Describing the life of a cowboy on a cattle ranch in Wyoming, it helped establish the western novel as a literary genre. The unnamed protagonist in The Virginian, who courts a local schoolteacher and defers personal revenge while meting out justice to a cattle thief, set the tone for the rough but civilized cowboy, a prototype for scores of ensuing books,...

A towering adventure story set in the wilds of Mexico after the First World War, "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" is B. Traven's much-beloved and thrilling tale of three desperate men who set out to make their fortune in the gold-filled Sierra Madre Mountains...and wind up confronting their own greed and paranoia along the way. The basis for the 1948 John Huston film of the same name (which featured Humphrey Bogart as Dobbs and an Oscar-winning...

An ancient feud between two frontier families is inflamed when one of the families takes up cattle rustling. In the grip of their relentless code of loyalty, they fight a war in Tonto Basin, desperately, doggedly, neither side seeing the futility of the conflict. Surrounded by this volatile environment, young Jean finds himself hopelessly in love with a girl from whom he is separated by an impassable barrier.

After a seven year absence, veteran of the Apache Wars Mark Talbot returns to the Dakota Territory to reunite with his brother on their family's cattle ranch to find some peace after fighting and bloodshed for over half of a decade. But when he returns, peace isn't what he finds. Talbot's brother was murdered five years earlier when the Double-X ranch began its quest for sole reign of the Bench, a fertile and prosperous region in the Dakota Territory....

Assigned to locate land in the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma that can be converted into pig farms for his employer, a young man meets the residents of Woolybucket and comes to respect their fierce desire to retain their land.