Harvey Fergusson

THE OVERRIDING THEMES of Harvey Fergusson's best fiction are the emasculating effects of time and the inevitability of change. In Fergusson'sworld view the forces of time and change are equally potent in shaping the lives of individuals, of societies, and of regions. The finest of his fiction is set in the American West, and it is historical fiction in the best sense of the term. Through the experience of individual characters, Fergusson encapsulates in microcosm the history of human life in the West–or, more specifically, the Southwest. Taken as an aggregate, the author's works constitute a historical diorama of breathtaking and provocative scope.

Fergusson was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1890, and was descended from men prominent in his native state's commerce and politics. His maternal grandfather, Franz Huning, came to Albuquerque via the Santa Fe Trail and stayed to become one of the city's most important merchants in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. His father, Harvey Butler Fergusson, was territorial representative and later the first congressman from New Mexico when the territory became a state. As a child Fergusson loved to hunt and fish and to wander through the wilderness areas of northern New Mexico. He also developed very early an abiding interest in the unique and colorful history of his state and region.

Nevertheless at age twenty-two, following graduation from his father's alma mater, Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, Fergusson moved from Albuquerque and never again made that city his official residence. When he left Albuquerque, he went first to Washington, D.C., where for a decade he covered the national political scene for a variety of newspapers. During that decade he met H. L. Mencken, at the time a powerful arbiter of literary taste. Fergusson and Mencken became friends, and Mencken encouraged the younger man to try his hand at fiction. Working for nearly two years, mainly at nights and on weekends, Fergusson produced a manuscript which Mencken was instrumental in getting published. The manuscript was a novel entitled The Blood of the Conquerors, a tale of love, greed, and racial discrimination set in twentieth-century Albuquerque. It was brought out by Alfred A. Knopf in 1921.

In the more than three decades from his first book until his last one, published in 1954, the author turned out fourteen volumes, ten of which are novels. In order to support his serious writing, however, he found it necessary to move to New York City in the 1920s and churn out formula stories for the mass-circulation periodicals (as did F. Scott Fitzgerald at about the same time). In the 1930s he was employed as a screenwriter by several Hollywood movie companies (as were Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Nathanael West, and other important American writers of the period).

From the early 1940s until his death in 1971 at age eighty-one, Fergusson lived in Berkeley, California, occupying a small apartment in the lovely hills behind the University of California campus. Though he continued to write until the end, he was unable to find publishers for several manuscripts completed after 1954. His work of the 1960s, he believed, was "too alien to contemporary literary fashion for writing about misery, violence, and perversion, the unholy trinity of publishing success."

Harvey Fergusson was, as one critic has suggested, a "spiritual Westerner" but an "intellectual Easterner." The author's ancestral and emotional roots were in the West, but he was educated in the East and always aspired to be taken seriously as an eastern intellectual. He was proud of such books as Modern Man: His Belief and Behavior (1936) and People and Power: A Study of Political Behavior in America (1947), works which juggle ideas from the realms of philosophy, sociology, economics, and politics. In these treatises Fergusson takes the liberal view of American democracy and individualism. He welcomes change, particularly the expansion of the American economy and growth in personal liberty. He argues that large cities are the locales in which such change is likely to occur, not in the nation's repressive small towns and rural areas. In these two books, at least, Fergusson hardly mentions the West at all; reading them, one might easily conclude that the author was reared in Cambridge, Massachusetts rather than Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Fergusson's "eastern" works are Modern Man and People and Power, the novels Capitol Hill (1923) and Women and Wives (1924), stories set in Washington, D.C. and New York, and even the novels Hot Saturday ( 1926), Footloose McGarnigal ( 1930), and The Life of Riley (1937), which are laid in twentieth-century New Mexico-but are written from an "eastern" perspective and feature a decidedly hostile attitude toward the West. These are the weakest of Fergusson's books. They are for the most part angry but curiously bloodless harangues against middle-class, small-town America; they lack emotional resonance and any restraint that wisdom might have imposed. Even worse, they now, in the 1980s, appear badly dated period pieces.

By far Fergusson's most convincing, readable, and fully realized books are those in which he tries to come to terms with the past, with history. As he himself once admitted, he was strongly attracted to the past, but he always had to struggle to prevent his falling into a shallowly romantic worship of the past. It is perhaps this tension–strong attraction balanced by willed skepticism and detachment–that accounts for the manifest superiority of the books that deal, in one way or another, with the history of the West. The volumes referred to are Rio Grande (1933), a wonderfully engrossing history of New Mexico's storied river valley, Home in the West (1944), a work of autobiography and personal history, and the novels Wolf Song (1927), In Those Days (1929), Grant of Kingdom (1950), and The Conquest of Don Pedro (1954). Remarks here will focus on these half-dozen books since they form the core of Fergusson's achievement as a literary artist.

Rio Grande does not attempt to encompass the whole of the great river's history, only that of its two-hundred-mile flow between the Colorado border and Albuquerque. The life that exists between those two points is demonstrably supported by the river's precious water, and within the area it drains, an astonishing variety of human experience and social forms has existed over the centuries. Fergusson not only read about the history of this region; during his lifetime, he carefully explored every part of its topography, from the floor of the river valley to the summit of Wheeler Peak near Taos, more than thirteen thousand feet above sea level. The writer had an opportunity to observe firsthand the life-giving properties of the Rio Grande; it is a river, according to his sister Erna, that "he has swum in, hunted along, jumped when it was low, fought when it was high." In Rio Grande personal experience, diligent research, and the writer's gifts as a prose stylist are brought into perfect register, and the resultant blend more than meets the late J. Frank Dobie's definition of good historical writing: "when interpretive power, just evaluation, controlled imagination and craftsmanship are added to mastery of facts."

Rio Grande divides neatly into three parts: an account of the Southwest's pre-Columbian inhabitants, the native Americans; a chronicle of the arrival of the Spanish, in all their feudal splendor, in the seventeenth century; and the story of the intrusion in the nineteenth century of the Anglos, who brought with them, along with their money and technology, "the modern spirit." If the materials in Rio Grande are structured around a single theme, that theme seems best summed up in the following statement from the book: "The character of a country is the destiny of its people. . . ." A land as harsh and demanding as northern New Mexico inevitably plays a part in shaping the lives of its inhabitants. Probably Fergusson is saying much the same thing here as Ross Calvin says in Sky Determines. "In New Mexico," writes Calvin, "whatever is both old and peculiar appears upon examination to have a connection with arid climate. Peculiarities range from the striking adaptation of the flora onwards to those of the fauna, and on up to those of the human animal."The Southwest attracts certain kinds of animals and people and repels others; those who remain must adapt themselves to its special ways and are irrevocably changed in the process. Even the money-culture of the Anglo, in the face of impenetrable necessity, subtly adjusted to the region's unique conditions. Change, Fergusson asserts in Rio Grande, will and must occur, but land and sky endure; they resist only those who fail to acknowledge their awesome power.

In sum, Rio Grande brings together in one book the history, geography, sociology, and anthropology of northern New Mexico. Still it is not a compendium of these disciplines, but a synthesis with all the fat rendered out; a lean book, it is the work of an artist rather than a fact-gatherer. The work's conclusions depend as much on intuitive "feel" as on research (though, as indicated, it contains plenty of that as well). Probably only a person like Fergusson, whose roots were deeply and sensitively embedded in southwestern soil, could properly employ such a potentially dangerous method; however, the method was without doubt expertly used, and from it issued a splendidly readable and enlightening interpretive study of a region's long and colorful history.

Home in the West: An Inquiry into My Origins was published when Fergusson was fifty-four years old. The book is partly autobiography, partly (as the subtitle indicates) a retrospective search for an ancestral heritage, and partly the account of one man's halting and sometimes painful education. The writer was born in the nineteenth century and was nurtured on nineteenth-century values and beliefs, and only with considerable difficulty was he able to teach himself to become a "modern man." As the story of an educational process, the work properly ends when the education is complete; chronologically, the final event in the narrative is a frank description of the author's sexual initiation in Washington, D.C. during World War I when he was in his late twenties.

The principal significance of Home in the West is that it is the personal record of a crucial period in American history–he decades between 1890 and 1920. During those years, Fergusson says, the nation was undergoing a profound social and ethical revolution. The social revolution had to do mainly with a large increase in population combined with a rapid changeover from a rural to a predominantly urban society. During this period the distance between large cities and rural areas seemed infinitely greater than the mere miles that separated them. Because of the rural and small-town people's suspicions of the "wicked city" on the one hand and the urban dweller's contempt for the country bumpkin on the other, divisions arose within the nation that have not been wholly resolved to this day. The ethical revolution had to do largely with a gradual relaxation of the strict sexual mores that most nineteenth-century Americans had adhered to.

All of this Fergusson chronicles with admirable detachment and restraint. Throughout Home in the West he illuminatingly demonstrates how his own personal experience paralleled the evolving social history of the nation as a whole. Maintaining his equilibrium in the narrative, the writer presents himself as a noteworthy, even singular, personality, while simultaneously showing that his life is in some ways representative of the age in which he lived. The result is an exemplary autobiography, one that remains relevant and interesting to a time that is now far removed from the era that it describes.

Fergusson's quartet of novels that dramatically portray the nineteenthcentury history of New Mexico are his most important literary monument. Wolf Song, the first of the series in terms of composition and publication, is one of the best of the batch. It is also, probably, the most neglected "classic" in western American fiction. John R. Milton, a leading critic of western literature, recently adjudged Wolf Song as "probably the best mountain man novel we have." When one considers that the novel's competitors for that title include such perennial bestsellers as A. B. Guthrie's The Big Sky (1947) and Frederick Manfred's Lord Grizzly (1954), Milton's praise is indeed impressive. Certainly a book that ranks with–or above–The Big Sky in the hierarchy of western fiction deserves more recognition and appreciation than it has thus far been accorded.

Like all of Fergusson's fiction laid in the nineteenth-century West, Wolf Song is grounded in a thick layer of historical detail. The story issues, at one level anyway, from Fergusson's wide reading in western history–in this instance, the history of the "mountain men," a handful of semibarbaric Anglos who roamed the great open stretches of the West in the 1830s and 1840s in search of adventure and beaver pelts. Virtually all of the mountain men were remarkable, almost absurdly heroic and courageous figures, loners–such as Sam Lash, the novel's protagonist–mostly from primitive communities in the Middle West and Upper South who had fled westward to a wilderness that offered both grand isolation and incredible hardships. The heyday of the mountain man was brief; by the middle of the century, he was most definitely an anachronism. But the mountain men had provided, by the time they exited from the scene, an unintended example for the ensuing waves of Anglo settlers that swarmed over the West in succeeding decades: they had plundered nature's bounty to support a prodigal and recklessly romantic life style.

Fergusson knew well the primary sources that chronicle the history of the mountain men, and he convincingly, yet unobtrusively, employed that knowledge in the writing of Wolf Song. (He drew heavily, for example, on characters and incidents described in George Frederick Ruxton's Life in the Far West, a classic eyewitness account of the western trappers.) The author–as he would later demonstrate in Rio Grande–was also intimately familiar with the manners and mores of the southwestern Indians and of the Spanish ricos ("the rich ones," the feudal aristocrats) who ruled much of New Mexico throughout the nineteenth century. Fergusson's masterful portrayal, in Wolf Song, of the rigid, tradition-bound social structure that the ricos established in the colonial Southwest supplies the tale with an especially rich and authentic cultural backdrop.

The history and culture of a region, however, provide only the raw materials of art. Fergusson uses–and uses consummately well–those raw materials, but his real triumph in Wolf Song is his brilliant projection of his characters' psychology and motivations, as well as their historical and cultural milieu. Sam Lash, Lola Salazar, and Black Wolf are the most prominent actors in the drama that the novel unfolds. In a general way, these three people represent the traditional triangle of southwestern social and ethnic strife–Anglo, Spanish, Indian. Their reality as individualized characters, however, springs from their personal interactions and conflicts, and from the thoroughly believable resolutions of conflict–through violence and love–that are achieved in the course of the narrative. The story's major characters may indeed be viewed as representative cultural types, but beyond such a simplified sociological interpretation of their roles, they are intensely realized and plausible human beings. In that fact, certainly, lies much of the novel's success as a work of art.

The style in which the novel is framed is another key to its success. The language of Wolf Song is appropriate to the heroic events that it describes. It is a lyrical and poetic language. Here are the opening lines of the book's first chapter: "Up from the edge of the prairie and over the range rode three. Their buckskin was black with blood and shiny from much wiping of greasy knives. . . . Hair hung thick to their shoulders. Traps rattled in rucksacks . . ." The alliteration (with its inevitable echoes of the Anglo-Saxon heroic epic Beowulf ) and the swift rhythm of these lines sing to the reader's ear. Fergusson's intention in Wolf Song was–as the style suggests and the very title of the book confirms–to tell a story in epic song as much as in the forms of more conventional fiction. He was successful in this purpose. Style and story combine in the novel to create an esthetic and emotional power that continues to speak to new generations of readers.

In Those Days: An Impression of Change, published in 1929, is a novel loosely based on the life and career of Fergusson's grandfather, Franz Huning. When he died around the turn of the century, Huning left a memoir that his grandson read for the first time in the 1920s. (The memoir, under the title Trader on the Santa Fe Trail, was published in 1973.) By his own account Huning was born in Germany, arrived in America as a teenager in 1848, and came to New Mexico as an ox-driver on the Santa Fe Trail. The young Huning was involved in several adventurous escapades appropriate to the wild western setting in which he found himself. He once trekked into Apache country to buy cheap mules that the Indians had stolen in Mexico; he and his party, however, were trapped in a snowstorm in the White Mountains of what is now Arizona, and were lucky to escape with their lives. After this incident he opened a general store on the plaza in Albuquerque, an enterprise that was an immediate success. Over the years he also built a flour mill and a sawmill and bought a great deal of farm and ranch land around Albuquerque.

Toward the end of the century Huning's financial successes became reverses, and at his death his possessions had dwindled to his house and the grounds on which it stood. According to Fergusson, his grandfather was not really a businessman. In fact, he disliked and distrusted the kind of urban businessman that the railroads brought to Albuquerque in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. Franz Huning was a merchant-adventurer, a creature of the old Southwest who was, as he himself realized, wholly alien to the bustling commercial atmosphere of turn-of-the-century America.

There are many parallels between the career of Franz Huning and that of Robert Jayson, the central character of In Those Days. In the novel Fergusson subtly points up the historical significance of the western merchants and storekeepers. Their role in the "taming" of the West was, as a matter of fact, probably more important than that of the violent types so widely portrayed in popular fiction and films. In the Southwest the storekeeper was often the most powerful person in his community. As the town's chief supplier and creditor, he possessed considerable political leverage, the delicate exercise of which became a kind of local art form.

The principal purpose of In Those Days, however, is not to supply a mercantile history of the Southwest; it is rather to illustrate dramatically one of the author's favored themes. The novel's subtitle, An Impression of Change, provides a clue to that theme. Fergusson believed that the history of the West was a great drama of endless change and of people's responses to change–their meeting or failing to meet the challenge of change. When an individual resists the swift current of change, the author contended, that individual and the institutions of which he is a part become rigid and inflexible; they are no longer viable. Concerning In Those Days, Fergusson once commented that his aim in writing the book was to trace "the long curve of a human destiny"–to take an overview from which the forces that shaped that destiny might be more clearly discerned. The more chronologically detached the view, the author claimed, the better one sees that Jayson is "dominated rather than dominating. Time and Change are the mighty characters in this story."

In order to follow "the long curve of a human destiny," Fergusson begins his tale with a portrait of Robert Jayson as a callow but energetic youth, lured by the westering impulse from his Connecticut home to territorial New Mexico. He concludes the story by showing Jayson as an impoverished old-timer, a man content to relax and daydream about the glorious excitement of the past. Jayson's life is long and eventful; it stretches, in terms of regional history, from the freight wagon to the automobile. This very circumstance, however, gives rise to a serious flaw in the book. The novel is not really lengthy enough to project a sense of fullness in chronicling so long a life. Fergusson settles, therefore, for zeroing in on four crucial stages of Jayson's career. Inevitably such a technique, and the abrupt shifts and lapses in chronology that it requires, makes the narrative seem choppy and disjointed in places. The reader wishes for more detail and smoother transitions than the brevity of the story can possibly allow. In Those Days, then, is the weakest of Fergusson's historical fictions. Even so, it remains a readable and thought-provoking novel.

Set against the grandeur of the northern New Mexico landscape, Grant of Kingdom, published in 1950, is perhaps Fergusson's best novel; it is, in addition, one of the great novels of western American literature. The story is based on the history of the Maxwell Land Grant, an enormous tract of nearly two million acres centering on the town of Cimarron, New Mexico. Ceded to Carlos Beaubien by the king of Spain, the land was held during the middle decades of the nineteenth century by Beaubien's son-in-law, Lucien Maxwell. Grant of Kingdom is Fergusson's fullest, most illuminating treatment of southwestern history. History, indeed, is the book's subject– not just historical facts, but the meanings inherent in the facts. In his foreword to the novel the author makes clear that he intends not only to develop a specific fragment of regional history but also to project a much wider vision of man's collective experience. Like the South's William Faulkner, Fergusson in Grant of Kingdom effectively uses the history of a plot of land– "a postage stamp of soil," in Faulkner's phrase–as a microcosm of a region's past; as Faulkner is said to have fashioned a "legend of the South" from the history of Yoknapatawpha County, so from the story of the Maxwell Land Grant Fergusson creates his legend of the American West.

Once again, in Grant of Kingdom as elsewhere in his fiction, Fergusson is concerned to show the workings of change on individuals and societies. Jean Ballard–an extension of Wolf Song's Sam Lash–is for a long while an energetic swimmer in the current of change. An ex-mountain man, he marries into the Coronel family and is transformed into el patron, "the absolute ruler of a minor kingdom, strictly feudal in its social structure." He establishes order by means of personal loyalty, rather than by smoothly functioning organization. Almost by force of personality alone, he brings peace, prosperity, and civilization to his grant, and his life's labors result in progress for an entire region. By the time he dies, however, Ballard is a human relic. He possesses no business sense, distrusting banks and risky investments. Inevitably he runs afoul of the go-for-broke economic system that settled over the West in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. For Ballard late in life, "work and physical danger are simple things to deal with. What makes life hard is the bewilderment of change and complication, the rush of people and money, the impact of unexpected things. . . ."

With the intrusion of railroads and money into what had been, even in Ballard's heyday, an unspoiled wilderness, an irrevocable change is worked: these instruments of modern society "destroyed one kind of man and created another." The man they create is the wheeler-dealer speculator and financier, Major Blore. Blore, for better or worse, is a "modern man" in every sense of the term. He understands the importance of proper organization, and he knows how to use money and technology. His lust for money and power springs from his childhood status as a poor white in the classconscious South, and he discovers in the newly opened West a formative society in which he may freely indulge his savage ambitions. Naturally Blore delights in toppling so exalted an aristocrat as Jean Ballard. He wrests control of the grant from the aged Ballard, divides it into small ranches and homesteads, and sells out at an enormous profit. However, Blore's dream of a populous city on the grant eventually withers and dies when the railroad passes the area by.

Of novels set in the nineteenth-century West, Grant of Kingdom is certainly one of the most suggestive and illuminating. It is chronologically inclusive, yet compact. It convincingly displays in microcosm the stages of social development, the cultural and technological forces, the procession of character types that shaped the history of the West. In reviewing the book when it first appeared, J. Frank Dobie said that Grant of Kingdom, though perhaps defective in minor ways, would endure as a work of art because it somehow evokes the unique tempos of both "earth and metal." Dobie's focus on narrative rhythm is very much to the point in evaluating the novel's effectiveness. The story–and the style in which it is told–advances not only with the leisurely pace of a great pastoral kingdom, but also with the clangorous urgency of invading money and machinery. With grace and wisdom, Grant of Kingdom suggests both the tragic disruption and the hopeful promise of time and change–and that, after all, is the dramatic rhythm of all human history, not just western history.

Fergusson's final published novel, The Conquest of Don Pedro, appeared in 1954. The author's last book was probably his most successful one in financial terms. It was made a Literary Guild selection, and a special edition of the novel was printed for members of the book club. In addition the work enjoyed good sales as a paperback. Moreover, the novel was well received by reviewers. Dan Wickenden, in a page-one review of the book in the New York Herald Tribune book review section, wrote: "In his fine, clear prose, Harvey Fergusson has carved from the raw material of the Southwest a notable work of art. . . . With The Conquest of Don Pedro, the fourteenth of his published works, one of America's finest writers comes triumphantly into his own." Wickenden's praise is high, but deserved. The Conquest of Don Pedro is without question a gem of a novel, and it comes very close to matching the literary quality of Grant of Kingdom.

As Grant of Kingdom extends and elaborates the story of Sam Lash from Wolf Song, The Conquest of Don Pedro further develops the central concerns and subjects of In Those Days. The protagonist of Conquest is Leo Mendes, a gentle, reflective Jewish peddler who abhors violence and declines to carry a gun, even in a society in which weapons are ubiquitous. Leo, then, is a different kind of hero–a "conqueror" who triumphs by thought and patience, but one whose accomplishments are just as important to the region's development as those of the men of action. Like Robert Jayson in In Those Days, he is a member of that fraternity of southwestern merchant-adventurers to which the author's grandfather belonged.

Leo possesses many unusual but genuinely useful qualities. He is an invader of sorts; he contributes "nothing to the conquest of the wilderness, but for the business of penetrating a human society he had certain gifts which were not common among American pioneers." He is a fatalist, calmly accepting the circumstance that "a man's destiny is a thing he discovers, a mystery that unfolds, and he pursued his ends always in the spirit of inquiry rather than of heroic determination." One of the things that make Leo such a formidable antagonist in business and in love is his fatalistic resignation to what has to be, combined with an unflinching competitiveness. His "conquest" is the establishment of a store in the village of Don Pedro, a small town a few miles north of El Paso. The title of the book is not merely ironic–though there is probably a touch of irony in it–for in a sense Leo's achievement is indeed a conquest. He is not ostentatiously heroic in the manner of Sam Lash or Jean Ballard; his virtues are patience and a quiet determination, by means of which he penetrates, more completely than he ever could have by physical bluster, the town's rigid feudal society.

The novel's technical virtuosity–which includes balanced and rounded structure, limpid style, and characters that are vivid and alive–is truly dazzling. But technical perfection in itself does not make a work great, and the special power of The Conquest of Don Pedro derives largely from the emotional vitality embodied in the character of Leo Mendes. In this narrative Fergusson is more interested than he had been in previous stories in following the mental processes of his central character, and most of the tale therefore is filtered through Leo's remarkable mind. Time and again the reader sees how Leo's long and sometimes painful reflections are the source of his actions. This meticulous reconstruction of motivation and behavior results in a character who becomes one of Fergusson's most attractive and believable people, a man drawn from the writer's rich store of thought and experience.

Taken together, Grant of Kingdom and The Conquest of Don Pedro manifest the fruition of the author's genius. Coming at the conclusion of a long career, these exceptional books dramatize, in their wisdom and sympathy, the writer's vision of life. Fergusson's historical fiction easily ranks his achievement as among the best so far fashioned by a western American writer. Yet, particularly during his life, the author found it difficult to please or even to get the attention of critics. Recently, however, writers and collectors of western literature have "discovered" his books. In addition critics have begun to examine the works in detail in order to isolate their special qualities. In recent years two books on Fergusson have appeared, as well as several worthwhile critical articles. John R. Milton, in The Novel of the American West, sees Fergusson as one of the half-dozen best western novelists. According to Milton, Fergusson's muted artistry is so smooth and efficient that it has attracted much less attention than it deserves. "At his best," writes Milton, "he handled style, structure, imagery, tone, and symbolism so quietly, simply, and capably that his virtues were hidden in his craftsmanship. There was nothing eccentric or startling or faddish for the critics and reviewers to pull out and examine." As favorable critical responses accumulate, then, acknowledgement of Fergusson's accomplishment grows. The writer's posthumous reputation seems destined to acquire, in the not-too-distant future, dimensions more commensurate with his actual, very considerable achievement.

WILLIAM T. PILKINGTON, Tarleton State University

Selected Bibliography

Primary Sources (in chronological order)

The Blood of the Conquerors. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1921.
Capitol Hill A Novel of Washington Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923.
Women and Wives. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1924.
Hot Saturday. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926.
Wolf Song. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927.
In Those Days: An Impression of Change. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1929.
Footloose McGarnigal. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1930.
Rio Grande. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1933.
Modern Man: His Belief and Behavior. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936.
Followers of the Sun: A Trilogy of the Santa Fe Trail. (Contains Wolf Song, In Those Days, and The Blood of the Conquerors.) New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936.
The Life of Riley. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1937.
Home in the West: An Inquiry into My Origins. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1944.
People and Power: A Study of Political Behavior in America. New York: William Morrow, 1947.
Grant of Kingdom. New York: William Morrow, 1950.
The Conquest of Don Pedro. New York: William Morrow, 1954.

Secondary Sources

Cohen, Saul. Harvey Fergusson: A Checklist (leaflet). Los Angeles: University of California at Los Angeles Library, 1965. By far the best bibliography of Fergusson's published works.

Dobie, J. Frank. "Earth and Metal."Southwest Review 35 (Autumn 1950): xviii–xxi. Perceptive comments on several of Fergusson's books by a wellknown southwestern author.

Folsom, James K. Harvey Fergusson (pamphlet). Austin: Steck-Vaughn, 1969. Very helpful introductory essay on the writer and his works.

Milton, John R. The Novel of the American West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980. Includes a lengthy chapter on Fergusson's fiction. Ranks Fergusson among the top western novelists.

Pilkington, William T. Harvey Fergusson. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1975. A book-length biographical-critical study.

Powell, Lawrence Clark. Books: West Southwest. Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie Press, 1957. Graceful tribute to Fergusson's southwestern writings by an enthusiastic commentator on the region's literature.

Robinson, Cecil. "Legend of Destiny: The American Southwest in the Novels of Harvey Fergusson." The American West 4 (November 1967): 16–18, 67–68. Convincingly explores mythic and legendary aspects of Fergusson's fiction.

. With the Ears of Strangers: The Mexican in American Literature. Tucson: Uni-versity of Arizona Press, 1963. Includes a thorough examination of Fergusson's use of Mexican-American characters and customs in his writings.

Wickenden, Dan. "Long Ago, and Far Away." New York Herald Tribune Book Review, 27 June 1954, pp. 1, 12. Notable review of The Conquest of Don Pedro. High praise for the writer's works, combined with good analysis of the novel.

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