The Good Old Boys (Hewey Calloway #1) (1978)

by Elmer Kelton

A story of the transition between one era and another. 

The year is 1906, and the Old West way of life is slipping away as barbed wire fences section up the country into private property, leaving few places for a free-spirited cowboy who loves the open range to ply his trade. 

Hewey Calloway, a good-natured drifter who sees no place for a man like himself in a rapidly industrializing future, spends some time with his brother’s family. 

Walter Calloway works hard every day and is burdened with responsibility, but he has family, community, and a stake in the future.

 Hewey has his freedom, but it also comes with a cost: loneliness, causing pain to others, and knowing that he is increasingly out of step with the world around him. 

Elmer Kelton smoothly tells a moving and humorous story that tackles themes of freedom vs. responsibility, the end of the frontier, family and belonging, and masculinity and identity without ever feeling pedantic. 

Elmer Kelton

This is the first book of Kelton’s that I have read but it won’t be the last.