John Seelye Ordre des livres (chronologique)

The literature of the "Old" West is very old indeed, but stories from the region began to appear only after the Civil War, as the short story emerged as a major literary form and the West emerged as a seperate, distinctly American culture. This collection brings together fifty of the best stories of the Old West by some of America's finest writers. From comic tales about California charlatans and prostitutes with hearts of gold to portrayals of tough, taciturn, and honorable cowboys and heroic cavalrymen; from razor-sharp stories of settlers struggling to survive in a savage land to the rare, sympathetic vision of American Indian culture, this is an indispensable collection of stories from an Old West always partly geographical, partly imagined.

Élevé dans un ranch du nord de la Californie, Jody est bien familiarisé avec le travail acharné et les exigences de la vie de rancher. Il connaît aussi le monde des chevaux, mais rien ne l'a préparé à la connexion spéciale qu'il va établir avec Gabilan, un poney au tempérament fougueux que son père lui offre. Avec Billy Buck, le main-d'œuvre engagé, Jody s'occupe et entraîne son cheval, attendant avec impatience le moment où il pourra s'asseoir haut sur la selle de Gabilan. Mais lorsque Gabilan tombe malade, Jody découvre qu'il lui reste encore des leçons à apprendre sur les lois de la nature et, en particulier, sur la nature humaine.

Edgar Allan Poe’s gift for the macabre–his genius in finding the strangeness lurking at the heart of things–was so extraordinary that he exerted a major influence on Baudelaire and French symbolism, on Freudian analysis, and also on the detective novel and the Hollywood movie. His psychologically profound stories of encounters with the marvelous, the uncanny, and the dreadful represent–in contrast to the optimism of writers like Emerson and Whitman–the other, darker side of the nineteenth-century American sensibility. (Jacket Status: Jacketed)