| Twenty years ago, in The Good Old Boys, Elmer Kelton introduced one of the most beloved characters in Western fiction, the Texas cowboy Hewey Calloway. Hewey returns in The Smiling Country. It is now 1910 and his free-wheeling life is coming to an end -- the fences, trucks, and automobiles he hates are creeping in even to remote Alpine, in the "smiling country" of West Texas. When he is badly injured trying to break a renegade horse, he thinks for the first time of his future and sees the loneliness that awaits him, and regrets his decision to run away from the only woman he has ever loved, the schoolteacher Spring Renfro. The Smiling Country is filled with humor, love, and the lore of the cowboy life at a time when the great, free, open ranges of the West were adjusting to a new, technological era. It is destined to stand, as so many Kelton books have, among the great Western novels of all time.
Annotation:
In the early 1900s, as the Texas of Hewey Calloway's youth is slowly eroding away, he feels time passing him by. Filled with regrets and plagued by an encroaching sense of responsibility, the cowboy mourns the death of the Wild West.
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