J. T. Edson - Later Life

Later Life

Edson openly claimed, though rather tongue-in-cheek, that he wrote for the money. In an article for Time magazine in February 1999, he declared that unlike such authors as Louis L'Amour, he had "no desire to have lived in the Wild West, and I've never even been on a horse. I've seen those things and they look highly dangerous at both ends and bloody uncomfortable in the middle."

Actually, this placed Edson in good company with the "first" of the "great" Western authors, Zane Grey, whose blood-and-thunder Westerns were hugely popular and gave no hint that their author was a middle-aged East Coast Dentist who was as far from a cowboy as you could get. Another example is Western author George G. Gilman, real name Terry Harknett, who was born and bred in Essex, England.

What set his books apart and took them to the next level was Edson's scrupulous attention to historical detail and accuracy, but which he rigorously didn't allow to drag the story down into a glorified geography or anthropology lecture. Not including his individual novels such as Slaughter's Way and Is-A-Man, J. T. Edson wrote 9 principal series, covering the following eras of American Western history: