Ernest Haycox books

Anthologies

Chapbooks

Essential Novelists Reading Order

Non-Fiction

Short Story Collections

Standalone Novels

Ernest Haycox was one of the most popular and respected Western writers of the first half of the twentieth century. Born in Portland, Oregon in 1899, he began selling stories to pulp magazines while still in college and quickly became a regular contributor to outlets like Short Stories and Collier’s. His fiction brought a literary seriousness to the Western genre that set him apart from many of his contemporaries.

Haycox published more than fifty novels and hundreds of short stories during his career. His best-known work, the short story “Stage to Lordsburg,” was adapted by John Ford into the 1939 film Stagecoach, which launched John Wayne’s career as a leading man. Several of his novels, including Canyon Passage and Bugles in the Afternoon, were also turned into Hollywood films.

He died in 1950 at the age of 51, but his work continued to be reprinted and collected for decades. Many of his novels were reissued in paperback throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and posthumous short story collections appeared as late as the 2010s.