Oakley Hall

Oakley Hall's legendary Warlock revisits and reworks the traditional conventions of the Western to present a raw, funny, hypnotic, ultimately devastating picture of American unreality. First published in the 1950s, at the height of the McCarthy era, Warlock is not only one of the most original and entertaining of modern American novels but a lasting contribution to American fiction. "Tombstone, Arizona, during the 1880's is, in ways, our national Camelot: a never-never land where American virtues are embodied in the Earps, and the opposite evils in the Clanton gang; where the confrontation at the OK Corral takes on some of the dry purity of the Arthurian joust. Oakley Hall, in his very fine novel Warlock has restored to the myth of Tombstone its full, mortal, blooded humanity. Wyatt Earp is transmogrified into a gunfighter named Blaisdell who . . . is summoned to the embattled town of Warlock by a committee of nervous citizens expressly to be a hero, but finds that he cannot, at last, live up to his image; that there is a flaw not only in him, but also, we feel, in the entire set of assumptions that have allowed the image to exist. . . . Before the agonized epic of Warlock is over with—the rebellion of the proto-Wobblies working in the mines, the struggling for political control of the area, the gunfighting, mob violence, the personal crises of those in power—the collective awareness that is Warlock must face its own inescapable Horror: that what is called society, with its law and order, is as frail, as precarious, as flesh and can be snuffed out and assimilated back into the desert as easily as a corpse can. It is the deep sensitivity to abysses that makes Warlock one of our best American novels. For we are a nation that can, many of us, toss with all aplomb our candy wrapper into the Grand Canyon itself, snap a color shot and drive away; and we need voices like Oakley Hall's to remind us how far that piece of paper, still fluttering brightly behind us, has to fall." —Thomas Pynchon

Warlock

A Novel

Apaches

The Last Word on Writing Fiction, from Basics to the Fine Points

How Fiction Works

Jack Schaefer

Walter Van Tilburg Clark

Alan Le May

Rediscover the golden age of the Western with this collection of four unforgettable novels of honor, adventure, and violence set against the magnificent landscapes of the American frontier The heroic exploits and violent struggles of the Old West come alive once more through this one-of-a-kind collection of four thrilling novels. Edited by Ron Hansen, this deluxe hardcover edition shows that the 1940s and 1950s was a golden age for the Western novel. In the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Ox-Bow Incident, Walter van Tilburg Clark explores the thin line between civilization and barbarism through the story of a lynch mob that targets three innocent men, exposing a dark authoritarian impulse at work the American frontier. Set in Wyoming in 1889, a time when ranchers and cattle companies waged war with each other, Jack Schaefer's iconic Shane deploys many of the genre's most essential elements, brilliantly filtered through a boy's perceptions. Alan Le May's The Searchers, the basis for John Ford's cinematic masterpiece starring John Wayne, follows the dogged quest of two men to rescue a young girl taken prisoner by Comanche warriors. And Oakley Hall's Warlock, a novel that anticipates the later books of Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry, casts the battle for control of a southwestern outpost as a bloody saga pitting a marauding gang of cowboys and rustlers against the town's defenders, led by the legendary gunslinger Clay Blaisedell. All four novels were memorably adapted for the screen, and their gripping stories--told with brisk narrative energy, psychological depth, and laconic humor--have contributed unforgettably to the Western's enduring legacy in American culture.

The Ox-Bow Incident / Shane / The Searchers / Warlock

The Western: Four Classic Novels of the 1940s & 50s (LOA #331)

Oakley Hall (1920-2008) was considered a great novelist of the American West, and as an inspiring writing teacher whose students include Amy Tan, Michael Chabon, and Richard Ford. The Bad Lands (Atheneum, 1978) is set in1883 in the Dakota Territory. It describes the closing of the open lands there, the end of the Beef Bonanza, and conflicts among ranchers. It blends action-packed western tropes (cattle round-ups, rustlers, the threat of hangings, much shooting, and a whore house) with an elegy to the wild beauty of the Bad Lands before cattle ranchers chased off the Native Americans and fenced it in."

The Bad Lands

Écrire avec précision, toucher les sens, le choix des mots, réussir les dialogues... A travers intrigues, personnages, choix des mots, voix et styles, l'auteur nous démonte pièce par pièce l'architecture d'histoires romanesques. Rien que la lecture de cet ouvrage donne d'emblée l'impression qu'on est déjà un écrivain à succès. Cet ouvrage vous donnera toutes les ficelles pour bien construire un récit de fiction. EXTRAIT Mes quinze commandements de l'écrivain : 1. Ecris tous les jours. 2. Observe et écoute. 3. Utilise tous tes sens. 4. Utilise des verbes forts. 5. Des détails ! 6. Sache que le spécifique battra toujours l'abstraction. 7. Mets de l'action. 8. Abonne-toi à des mots forts. 9. Apprends à dramatiser la fiction. 10. Ecris des dialogues courts. 11. Apprends à traquer les faiblesses dans tes écrits. 12. Attention aux clichés et aux idées vagues. 13. Ne confonds jamais intrigue fouillée et obstacle dans un récit. 14. Dans tes corrections, apprends à suppprimer les adverbes. 15. Inspire-toi des autres, mais reste toi-même. À PROPOS DE L'AUTEUR Oakley Hall (1920 - 2008) est un écrivain américain de roman policier et de western. Il fait des études universitaires à Berkeley, en Californie, et dans l’Iowa, puis sert dans les Marines lors de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. À partir de 1968, il est professeur d’anglais à l’Université de Californie à Irvine et directeur de cours d’écriture. Son livre le plus célèbre, Warlock, est finaliste du prix Pulitzer en 1958.

Guide pratique

Mécanisme des histoires romanesques

The legendary lost crime novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Oakley Hall, instructor of Ann Rice, Amy Tan, Richard Ford, and Michael Chabon, who calls SO MANY DOORS "Beautiful, powerful, even masterful." A man sits in a cell on death row, sentenced to die for the murder of the beautiful woman called V. But as we learn the story of her death - and of her troubled, torrid life - one question haunts us: why would any man kill the woman he craves more than life itself?

So Many Doors

From the acclaimed author of Warlock comes “an elegiac, incandescent 1880s Dakota badlands Western that bears comparison to the greats” (Kirkus). It’s 1883 in Johnson County, in the old Dakota Territory—a rugged, wide-open landscape of rolling red earth, prairie, and cattle as far as the eye can see. But the land is closing, the “Beef Bonanza” is ending, and the free-range cattlemen are stuck watching their way of life disappear in a blaze of drought and gunfire. An action-packed western from one of the masters of the genre, Oakley Hall’s The Bad Lands blends roundups and rustlers, whorehouses and land grabs, shoot-outs and the threat of hangings in a tale of the war between the cowboys and the cattle barons. But more than this, it is an elegy to the wild beauty of the badlands before the ranchers moved in, chased off the free-rangers, the trappers, and the tribes, and fenced it all in. “Readers unable to suppress an unfashionable yearning for a good story will be delighted with The Bad Lands.”—Larry McMurtry, The New York Times

Oakley Hall

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