The Feudist: A Novel of the Pleasant Valley War

Reader Views Bronze Award for Historical Fiction
Reader Views Western Mountain Regional Award Winner
Royal Dragonfly Book Awards, Second Place, Western Fiction, 2021
The SPR Book Awards, Finalist 2021
National Indie Excellence Awards, Western Fiction, Finalist 2021
American Book Fest's Best Book Awards, Western Fiction, Finalist 2021

The Feudist: A Novel of the Pleasant Valley War is both a traditional Western--tense, authentic, fast-paced--and an anti-Western that tells the story of what was perhaps the bloodiest range war in US history, Arizona's 1880s Pleasant Valley War. The narrator--a small-time rancher named Ben Holcomb who reflects back on his adolescent experiences--begins the story as a stockboy in Globe City, Arizona. Bored with his job, he agrees to become an apprentice cowboy. His journey to his employer's ranch leads him into a smoldering range war. Over the next year, he rides with a charismatic trickster; a Texas "colonel" and his idealist daughter; a polygamous Mormon elder with a teenaged wife; and a winsome, mixed-race cowboy who is deeply embroiled in the feud. Though Ben tries to stay out of the quarreling, he finds himself embroiled as he stumbles through passionate love, devastating loss, and moral uncertainty. Herman's attention to historical forces, his spare style, his self-deprecating narrator, and his authentic characters give the novel a verisimilitude that transcends the genre Western and far surpasses Zane Grey's 1922 romance about the Pleasant Valley War, To the Last Man.

Author: Daniel Herman
Publisher: Texas Christian University Press
Published: 06/09/2020
Pages: 256
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.80d
ISBN13: 9780875657479
ISBN10: 0875657478
BISAC Categories:
- Fiction | Historical | General
- Fiction | Westerns | General

About the Author

DANIEL HERMAN is professor of history at Central Washington University. His historical monographs have garnered multiple prizes, including the Charles Redd Center-Phi Alpha Theta Book Award in Western History and the Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award. The Feudist is his first essay into fiction. Herman lives in Ellensburg, Washington, with his wife, Margareta, and daughter, Persia.