Eugene Manlove Rhodes – författare

Eugene Manlove Rhodes's masterpiece, "Pasó Por Aquí", opens this collection of his short novels and stories, set in New Mexico, where he lived during the 1880s and 1890s. J. Frank Dobie praised Rhodes's artistry, and Bernard DeVoto thought he wrote "much the best dialogue . . . Of western characters since Mark Twain." Included are the novelettes "Good Men and True," "Bransford of Rainbow Range," and "The Trusty Knaves."

Taking his title, Pasó Por Aquí, from Juan de Oñate's carving in the living rock of El Morro, New Mexico, Eugene Manlove Rhodes created his own memorial to the decent people of his world who had ""passed this way"" without fanfare.Rhodes wrote about them with wit, gusto, and tenderness, with honesty, clarity, and a sureness of interpretation as yet unequaled. He captured for all time the free, lonely, self-reliant, skilled, eternally optimistic essence of his West.Rhodes himself rode a brindle steer, fleeing from an irate sheriff, as his story hero McEwen does, and Rhodes made seven miles on his bovine mount before the beast ""sulled"" on him. Rhodes was also a volunteer nurse in a diphtheria pest house when El Garrotillo (the strangler) was the most feared disease in the isolated West.Pat Garrett appears here under his own name and in a favorable light - Rhodes's way of rebutting what he considered unfair disparagement of Garrett by other writers. The story was filmed in 1948 as Four Faces West, starring Joel McCrea in the lead and Charles Bickford as Pat Garrett.Eugene Manlove Rhodes was one of the great writers of the Western, and this is his most anthologized story. Students of western history and American literature, and everyone who loves tales of the Old West will enjoy this Rhodes classic.

Eugene Manlove Rhodes, who coined New Mexico’s official state nickname “the Land of Enchantment,” was a superlative writer of fiction in the Southwest during the early twentieth century. This new annotated edition of two of his best novels provides the ideal introduction to this unjustly neglected writer. A real-life cowboy, rancher, miner, and army scout for twenty-five years before launching his literary career, Eugene Manlove Rhodes depicted the times and terrain of southern New Mexico in popular fiction hailed for its realism. He elevated the Western novel to a literary art form. Rhodes is best remembered today for the brief novel that is generally considered his masterpiece, Pasó por Aquí. Inspired by the 1905 robbery of the First National Bank of Belén, Rhodes’s story follows bank robber Ross McEwen as he is pursued across the deadly wasteland of the infamous Jornada del Muerto by a posse led by legendary New Mexican lawman Pat Garrett. Like Pasó por Aquí, The Desire of the Moth offers a revisionist Western featuring a hero on the lam from the law—but in this story, largely set around Las Cruces, New Mexico, the alleged criminal is actually an innocent man targeted for lynching by his political opponents. This new annotated edition of two of Rhodes’s best-loved stories includes an introductory essay and notes by critic Gary Scharnhorst along with a map of Gene Rhodes’s New Mexico showing important sites mentioned in the stories.