Zane Grey

This collection doesn't get much better. It has his best, Riders of the Purple Sage, along with the truest telling ever possible of the Graham-Tewksbury Feud, as Zane Grey talked with old timers who lived during the period. The Thundering Herd is his salute to the American Bison which was almost hunted to extinction. There is nothing triumphal in this book, especially if you have read the unexpurgated version, Buffalo Stampede. The Hashknife Outfit is the "sequel" to The Drift Fence, and maybe it should have been included in this collection instead of one of the others, but this story is independent enough to stand on its own. And West of the Pecos is just one of Zane Grey's novels to feature a girl pretending to be a boy, at least in the beginning. All in all these five are some of his best, written from the start of his career to later in the 1930's when his star had begun to wane because of the Depression and magazines could no longer afford his work. Get this one.