Winner, 2021 National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum Western Heritage Award, Art/Photography Book (The Wrangler) Sometime in 1947, a letter arrived in the mailbox of Harold Dow Bugbee, already a well-known and highly sought illustrator for western pulp magazines and other publications. “Sir,” it began, “I have seen several of your pictures in the Cattleman. Sure like them and I am writing you to ask if you have all of your pictures in a book—if you do—we want to buy one.” “After seventy years of waiting,” writes Michael R. Grauer in this colorful survey of Bugbee’s life and career, “here is such a book.” Bugbee and his family arrived in Clarendon, Texas, in 1914, from Massachusetts. He helped his father with the 1,000-acre family ranch and eventually attended the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas, where he studied architectural drawing. Subsequently, he enrolled at the Cumming School of Art in Des Moines, Iowa, but left after two years when the founder of the school told the young Texan that he had learned all the school had to offer. Bugbee avidly absorbed cowboy scenes and the lifestyle that birthed them. He filled canvases with colorful, authentic images that capture the spirit of the American West of the early to mid-1900s, especially in and near his beloved Texas Panhandle. By the 1930s, Bugbee was providing pen-and-ink sketches for magazines such as Ranch Romances, Western Stories, Country Gentleman, and Field and Stream. This richly illustrated overview of the man and his art provides a valuable and entertaining resource for collectors and students of western and Texas art.

Inventory of Dykes' book collection.

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Although the origins of the western are as old as colonial westward expansion, it was Owen Wister?s novel The Virginian, published in 1902, that established most of the now-familiar conventions of the genre. On the heels of the classic western?s centennial, this collection of essays both re-examines the text of The Virginian and uses Wister?s novel as a lens for studying what the next century of western writing and reading will bring. The contributors address Wister?s life and travels, the novel?s influence on and handling of gender and race issues, and its illustrations and various retellings on stage, film, and television as points of departure for speculations about the ?new West??as indeed Wister himself does at the end of the novel. ø The contributors reconsider the novel?s textual complexity and investigate The Virginian's role in American literary and cultural history. Together their essays represent a new western literary studies, comparable to the new western history.

Each era in the history of the West has produced a small group of artists who have served to define the Western art genre and whose works have struck a particular chord with the public. Today, the market for Western art continues to boom and the Cowboy Artists of America have made the biggest contribution to this phenomenon. The most prestigious and widely recognized group of Western artists in the country, the CAA has defined the parameters of Western art, dictating style, subject matter, and market value. This large-format book features the artwork of more than fifty current and past members of this elite organization of painters and sculptors. Their subjects range from mountain men, early settlers, and Native Americans, to cowboy life of both the old West and the contemporary ranch. The Western landscape's defining character provides an underlying force throughout.

Maynard Dixon embellished themes that encompassed the timeless truth of the majestic western landscape, the humanity of its memorable people, and the religious mysticism of the Native American. In an attempt to uncover the spirit of the American West, Dixon roamed its plains, mesas, and deserts—drawing, painting, and expressing his creative personality in poems, essays, and letters. Written in a very personal style, this biography includes anecdotes from Dixon’s children, historical vignettes, and interviews with those who knew the artist.