Bestselling author C.J. Box shares the literary love for many of his colleagues’ work — and takes a short dip into western lit’s all-time classics.
“I am really a proponent of the gritty reality as opposed to the cliche of the western where everybody kind of talks in a Southern accent in the Mountain West and somewhere yonder down the road a piece kind of stuff,” beloved author C.J. Box says. “I really dislike that.”
We’re not surprised, then, that Box—the creator of the Joe Pickett series and many other memorable takes on the West—included some award-winning historic novelizations and nonfiction narratives when we asked him to name his favorite books from the contemporary era. He also admits to evading our assignment just a bit when getting to his last picks. But who needs rules when you’re C.J. Box? Read on to see what’s on his permanent shelf.
Ridgeline by Michael Punke (Macmillan, 2021)
- This is a novelization of a true story featuring the epic defeat of the U.S. Army by Red Cloud and Crazy Horse in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming. Told from various points of view and historically accurate, this one’s a winner on all counts.
The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin (Simon & Schuster, 2013)
- Here we go with Red Cloud again, but that’s the point. Red Cloud should be mentioned anytime there’s a list of great American Indian leaders. This no-holds-barred account tells the reader why.
Winter Counts by David Heska Wanbli Weiden (Ecco, 2020)
- Set in modern South Dakota and Colorado, Weiden explores a unique loophole in American jurisprudence where natives sometimes hire their own enforcers within the Sioux tribe because the feds can’t, or won’t, enforce the law. Funny, violent, and well-rendered.
Throne of Grace: A Mountain Main, An Epic Adventure, and the Bloody Conquest of the American West by Tom Clavin and Bob Drury (St. Martin’s Press, 2024)
- Like Red Cloud, every student of the American West should know the name of Jedediah Smith, who was perhaps the greatest of the early Mountain Men. Like a 19th-century Zelig, Smith was everywhere.
Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West by Hampton Sides (Doubleday, 2006)
- Brilliantly researched and written, this biography of Carson is a road- map to the battles and 19th-century exploration of the American Southwest.
Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West by Stephen E. Ambrose (Simon & Schuster, 1997)
- The best book written about the Lewis & Clark Expedition, in my view. Not only is it sweeping; it contains little factoids that make your head explode, like finding out members of the expedition ate ten pounds of meat a day.
The Sisters Brothers: by Patrick deWitt (House of Anansi Press, 2011)
- Wildly imaginative, lustful, comic, and wildly violent, this novel is not for the squeamish. A frontier roadtrip with no rules.
Blood Meridian; or, the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy (Random House, 1985)
- Some novels stay with you, this is one of them for me. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, McCarthy produced the most violent, amoral, unforgettable tale with the worst villain ever imagined: The Judge.
Close Range: Wyoming Stories by Annie Proulx (Scribner, 1999)
- Although the best-known story from this collection is Brokeback Mountain, in my opinion, it’s not the best. The Half-Skinned Steer is one of the bleakest, toughest, and truest of her portrayals and it’s all that more impactful to me because the tragic setting seems to be right out my office window.
The Big Sky by A.B. Guthrie, The Time It Never Rained by Elmer Kelton, The Ox Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark, and True Grit by Charles Portis
- I’m cheating now. These four titles have to be included in any list of the greatest westerns I’ve ever read, or ever will read. The Big Sky helped set me on my path, The Time It Never Rained is the grittiest and most realistic modern western, The Ox Bow Incident has never been replicated for building tension, and True Grit literally reinvents the English language in a way that’s both musical and provocative.
From our May/June 2025 issue. Learn more about C.J. Box at cjbox.net.
PHOTOGRAPHY: Header courtesy Jimena Peck.
