I must have been around twelve years old when I fell in love with the books my dad was reading, the cowboy novels of Zane Grey, Max Brand, Luke Short. I had a child’s view of the world then, and the adventure, the clean violence and simple morality of my dad’s white-hatted cowboy heroes suited me just fine. And it would have been a few years later, after I’d reached a more complicated understanding of the world, that I first stumbled on Frank O’Rourke’s novel The Diamond Hitch, not shelved with Max Brand and his cohorts but residing (as I thought of it) on the real shelves with the real books.

      I read it two or three times in my teens. I understood, even then, that if it was not quite a book for the Literary Canon it was more authentic in feeling, in landscape, in the depth of its perceptions, more accurate in its details and in the complexity of the lives of its characters than the traditional western fiction I’d grown up loving. It was my first encounter with a writer nudging the mythology of the cowboy away from blood and bravery toward a darker, more complex truth.

      When Dewey Jones steps off the train in Holbrook, Arizona, he’s flat broke after a summer following the rodeo circuit. He lands work as a cook and horse breaker for a winter roundup, and this first long part of the novel follows Dewey and the rest of the roundup crew through days and weeks of hard, hot, exhausting, dusty, dangerous work. There is little that might be called “adventure.” There are two Apaches working the roundup, though none of the other men remark on this in any particular way. There is no gunplay—Dewey has a gun in his bedroll but he never brings it out. And when he returns to the rodeo that summer it’s to a nervous, bright, seductive world with its own dangers—his dreams of big wins perennially wrecked by late nights and too much bootleg liquor. There is no straight-up villain, just an overweening rival for the affections of Mary Ashford. And this is not a West frozen in the amber of the 1880s, but the real and changing West of Model T Fords and moving pictures and Prohibition.

      When I began to write about the West myself, it was O’Rourke’s novel more than any other that I sometimes consciously and more often unconsciously took as a model. I didn’t have Dewey Jones in mind, for instance, when I wrote The Jump-Off Creek, but Tim Whiteaker is a cowhand who bakes pies for his neighbors and takes off-season work as a cook for a logging crew; in this, and in many other small details of western life and work as I’ve written of it, I know that I owe a debt to The Diamond Hitch. And I also know, in a larger sense, that O’Rourke’s novel is one of the main reasons I have spent my writing life trying to reimagine the cowboy hero—steering clear, as he did, of gunslingers and savages, looking always for stories grounded in the heroism of ordinary lives.

      In the traditional western novel, violence is the easy and only answer to every problem, an answer without honest pain or consequence; and it seems to me that the shadow of that violence, the shadow of the cowboy hero, has darkened our American politics, our national identity, our values and beliefs. But I feel strongly that storytelling can not only help us witness ourselves as we are in the world, but also think in fresh ways about ourselves as we might become. In The Diamond Hitch, Frank O’Rourke was working in a smaller, quieter corner of the West, a place where the heroism and the violence were downplayed, half-concealed in the mundane details of a hard life, a life in which the best values of the western myth—the courage, the self-reliance, the toughness—were always mindfully upheld.

      And there is one more very particular and very personal