When Elmer Kelton died in the fall of 2009, the literary world lost a consummate writer, a man the New York Times called a "novelist who brought the sensibility of the old-style western to bear on a modern Texas landscape of oil fields and financially troubled ranches." Kelton was also a modest, kind man, always willing to advise a struggling writer or write a blurb for a first time published author, or assign publishing rights to his six masterpieces...