‘A superb piece of reporting& compounded of myth, brutality, beauty, and commonplace, even comical, reality.’Chicago Tribune‘The West that Henry mourned belonged to the Western movie, where the land and the cattle went to their proper guardians and bought a fortune in respect and power. It was a West where the best cowboy got to shot the meanest outlaw, woo the prettiest schoolteacher, bed her briefly to produce sons, and then ignore her for finer company of other cowboys – a West as sentimental and as brutal as the people who made a virtue of that curious combination of qualities and called it the American experience.’ From The Last CowboyHenry Blanton is the ‘last cowboy’ of Jane Kramer’s classic portrait, the failed hero of his own mythology, the man who ends an era for himself. His history – his flawed, funny, and in the end tragic efforts to be a proper cowboy, ‘expressin’ right’ in a world where the range is a the range is a feed yard and college boys run ranches from air-conditioned Buicks – is the story of a country coming of age in great promise and greater disappointment. A hundred and fifty miles up the highway from agribusiness Amarillo, Henry claimed the extravagant prerogatives of a free man on a horse. He rode on his own frontier, docked out in his vigilance and his honour, until the shocking moment when, in the person of Henry Blanton, the West and the Western had a showdown.‘Neither Gary Cooper not John Wayne could probably have done much better& An evocative and valuable piece of social history.

’Newsweek‘Jane Kramer is a good witness to the crippled dreams and frustrations of the hard-scrabble life and to that haunting solitude indigenous to the wide open spaces.’New York Times Book Review.