The Hanging Tree

This isn't the "bang-bang, shoot-em-up" West, but tales of life where the reality jumps off the pages. They are tales of quiet heroism and patient sympathy, in a language of wonderful imagination. People in these stories are just trying to live, love, and get through the day. I'm grateful to the friend who told me about Dorothy Johnson; her work reads just like yarns told around a campfire, and you can almost hear a grizzled old cowpoke's voice. If only an imaginative publisher would issue them in audio!

THE HANGING TREE is a wonderful collection of frontier tales by a woman who has gotten unfairly short shrift as a very fine American writer. Dorothy Johnson's stories, set mostly in her native Montana, dealt with men and women, frontier riff-raff, lawmen, and Indians. These are no stereotypical westerns, they are stories of the human condition that happen to take place on the frontier. The title story in this collection, THE HANGING TREE, is the best, I think. A haunting tale of an ill-fated frontier doctor -- Joe Frail -- it works as a pure western, as a moving love story, and as a psychological character study. It was the basis for Gary Cooper's last western, one of the finest westerns ever made, the masterful THE HANGING TREE.

Dorothy M. Johnson's stories echo real life. I got the sense that most of her characters came to her from bits and pieces of the people she grew up around. Although she wrote for the 40's and 50's, there is nothing dated about this book.As a people , we haven't changed much.

My husband and I have never had similar tastes in westerns, but we both loved this book of short stories! It is one of the best collections of western stories I have ever read. I have read it several times and find it a must to own!