Cowboy

'I always wanted to be a cow-puncher,' says Shorty Caraway. 'As a little kid back on the farm in east Texas I couldn't think of nothin' else.' Shorty's father took some persuading, but in the end he staked his fourteen-year-old son to a white pony, a second-hand saddle, and 'forty dollars to go with the two I had, an' he said that ought to run me until I got a job.' What happened from that day until Shorty was taken on as a regular hand is told in the pages of Ross Santee's Cowboy, first published in 1928.'From beginning to end the reader is made at home in a world of unique standards, customs and preoccupation through the eyes of a boy who absorbs them with quick, keen ardor. He tells his own story without a backward glance toward home, without any curiosity concerning the lives of the millions who live in other worlds than his. By virtue of this contracted point of view one gets a singularly intensive and intimate picture of the cowboy and the things that make up his existence.'-New York Herald Tribune Books'Here is a Wild West narrative that is literature-and it closely verges upon being 'Treasure Island' literature. Here the boy is, 'all boots an' spurs,' with dreams in his head and the will to make them materialize.'-Saturday Review of Literature