Historical in substance, romantic in spirit, heroic in scale, A Distant Trumpet is a novel of the American West. At its center is Matthew Carlton Hazard, born in 1857 at Fox Creek, Indiana; raised by his mother after his father's death in the Battle of Chickamauga; and designated, at the solemn age of seven, by President Abraham Lincoln himself to the Army of the United States. Commissioned in 1880 as second lieutenant of cavalry, Matthew reports for duty to Fort Delivery, Arizona, where he will contend in the Apache Wars; serve under and with brave fellow officers like Captain Hiram Prescott and the enigmatic Major General Upton Quait; learn the ways of love and duty in his marriage to Laura Greenleaf; befriend White Horn, Apache-chief-turned-Army-Scout, and with him conduct a death-defying mission to bring peace at last to the wild, war-torn Western frontier.

Assembling a cast of memorable characters and crafting one exciting episode after another, Paul Horgan proves himself in these pages as a master storyteller with the head of a hist-orian and the heart of a poet. A best-selling success after its original publication in 1960, A Distant Trumpet has been hailed as a towering structure of romantic fiction built on a solid foundation of fact; a vivid, pulsating tale; a first-rate historical novel about the eternally mystifying, fascinating, dramatic complexities of human character; and the finest novel yet on the Southwest.

An epic history of the American southwest.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History (1954)
Winner of the Bancroft Prize in History (1954)

Winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and Bancroft Prize for History, Great River was hailed as a literary masterpiece and enduring classic when it first appeared in 1954. It is an epic history of four civilizations--Native American, Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo-American--that people the Southwest through ten centuries. With the skill of a novelist, the veracity of a scholar, and the love of a long-time resident, Paul Horgan describes the Rio Grande, its role in human history, and the overlapping cultures that have grown up alongside it or entered into conflict over the land it traverses. Now in its fourth revised edition, Great River remains a monumental part of American historical writing.

In early-twentieth-century New York, a young boy enjoys a happy, ordinary childhood. Then, one by one, Richard sees his childhood securities crumble before the pitiless facts of a fallen world: the wanton cruelty of other children, the inconstancy of the grown-ups and inscrutability of their world, the overwhelming otherness of God, and the seemingly indomitable capacity in himself for sin. Things As They Are draws its thematic power from Richard's reflection that children are artists who see and enact through simplicity what their elders have lost through experience. The loss of innocence is a lifelong process-the wages of original sin. As each pivotal event manifests, Richard must meet it with courage as much as faith, hope, and love, in order to safeguard his dignity and reach that maturity of stature for which he longs.

Told with a rare lyrical power and an unaffected poignancy, Things As They Are achieves a unity of robust realism and profound spiritual acuity which makes it clearly deserving of its place among the most beautiful and moving American novels (David McCullough).

The extraordinary biography of a pioneer hero of the frontier Southwest.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History (1976)

Originally published in 1975, this Pulitzer Prize for History-winning biography chronicles the life of Archbishop Jean Baptiste Lamy (1814-1888), New Mexico's first resident bishop and the most influential, reform-minded Catholic official in the region during the late 1800s. Lamy's accomplishments, including the endowing of hospitals, orphanages, and English-language schools and colleges, formed the foundation of modern-day Santa Fe and often brought him into conflict with corrupt local priests. His life story, also the subject of Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop, describes a pivotal period in the American Southwest, as Spanish and Mexican rule gave way to much greater influence from the U.S. and Europe. Historian and consummate stylist Paul Horgan has given us a chronicle filled with hardy, often extraordinary adventure, and sustained by Lamy's magnificent strength of character.

To children-as to artists-all life is metaphor. The genius of Paul Horgan is that he could express life with such charm and intelligence that the resemblances he suggested are themselves clear and honest reflections of reality. These twenty stories, inspired by the diverse backgrounds and experiences of Horgan's own life, are selected from four decades of writing and arranged, not by time period, but by theme. The first set speaks of childhood, with the poignancy of To the Mountains, Winners and Losers, The One Who Wouldn't Dance, and Black Snowflakes. The second speaks of youth, with the startling vitality of A Start in Life, In Summer's Name, So Little Freedom, The Huntsmen, The Treasure, and National Honeymoon. The third speaks of maturity, with the seasoned frankness of The Surgeon and the Nun, The Other Side of the Street, Tribute, The Small Rain, and the title story. The fourth speaks to age, with the grave wisdom of The Hacienda, Old Army, The Head of the House of Wattleman, The Devil in the Desert, and The Candy Colonel.

Whether the stuff of comedy, tragedy, or irony, the stories of The Peach Stone illuminate life as an adventure of both struggle and significance, and celebrate the divine spark that flickers in the heart of each man, woman, and child.

No historian writes with such command of language or feeling for human nature. The difference is his luminous imagination, as Henry Steele Commager observes in the introduction to the newest Horgan volume, Of America East & West, a sumptuous selection from fifteen of the earlier works, many of which have been long out of print. I began reading Paul Horgan more than twenty years ago and he has given me no end of pleasure ever since. Whether in fiction, history or biography, he is a writer of large vision and manysidedness. He can be serene, funny, elegant, earthy and lyrical. He can range across art, opera, politics, natural history, military history and intellectual history. Narrative energy suffuses everything he writes. But it is his gift of empathy that lifts his work to the level of art and gives the history he writes 'reality.'

Gathers brief, humorous poems about Marie Antoinette, Flaubert, Fitzgerald, Thoreau, Woolf, Sand, Dreiser, James, Browning, Stein, Bach, Poe, Liszt, Brahms, and Freud.