Stephen Harrigan Books In Order

Novels

  1. Aransas (1980)
  2. Jacob’s Well (1984)
  3. The Gates of the Alamo (2000)
  4. Challenger Park (2006)
  5. Remember Ben Clayton (2011)
  6. A Friend of Mr. Lincoln (2016)
  7. The Leopard Is Loose (2022)

Non fiction

  1. Contemporary Texas (1986)
  2. A Natural State (1988)
  3. Water and Light (1992)
  4. Comanche Midnight (1995)
  5. The Eye of the Mammoth (2013)
  6. They Came from the Sky (2017)
  7. Big Wonderful Thing (2019)

Novels Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Stephen Harrigan Books Overview

The Gates of the Alamo

A huge, riveting, deeply imagined novel about the siege and fall of the Alamo, an event that formed the consciousness of Texas and that resonates through American history. With its vibrant, unexpected characters and its richness of authentic detail, The Gates of the Alamo is an unforgettable re creation of a time, a place, and a heroic conflict. The time is 1835. At the center of a canvas crowded with Mexicans and Americans, with Karankawa and Comanche Indians, with settlers of many nationalities, stand three people whose fortunes quickly become our urgent concern: Edmund McGowan, a naturalist of towering courage and intellect, whose life’s work is threatened by the war against Mexico and whose character is tested by his own dangerous pride; Mary Mott, a widowed innkeeper on the Texas coast, a determined and resourceful woman; and her sixteen year old son, Terrell, whose first shattering experience with love leads him instead to war, and into the crucible of the Alamo. As Edmund McGowan and Mary Mott take off in pursuit of Terrell and follow him into the fortress, the powerful but wary attraction between them deepens. And the reader is drawn with them into the harrowing days of the battle itself. Never before has the fall of the Alamo been portrayed with such immediacy. And for the first time the story is told not just from the perspective of the American defenders but from that of the Mexican attackers as well. We follow Blas Montoya, a sergeant in an elite sharpshooter company, as he fights to keep his men alive not only in the inferno of battle but also during the long forced march north from Mexico proper to Texas. And through the eyes of the ambitious mapmaker Telesforo Villasenor, we witness the cold deliberations of General Santa Anna. Filled with dramatic scenes, abounding in fictional and historical personalities among them James Bowie, David Crockett, and William Travis The Gates of the Alamo enfolds us in history, and through its remarkable and passionate storytelling allows us to participate at last in an American legend.

Challenger Park

Compelling and moving At the story’s heart is the mystery of love and the relationship that exists between husband and wife, parent and child. San Francisco Chronicle Lucy Kincheloe is a smart, ambitious woman torn between her career and her family struggling to figure out what matters to her most. The Washington Post Book World A fine, absorbing achievement a stately novel whose emotional precision is matched by the exactitude of its prose. The New York Times Book Review Epic in scope but human in scale, a tale of grand adventure packed with individual emotions. Texas Monthly I ntriguing and thoughtful under Harrigan s control, melodrama is stripped; he leaves enough spice to drive the human side of the plot while treating the science with respect and intelligence. The Chicago Tribune’This is an intimate and soulful novel in which Harrigan balances love, family, and desire.’ Library Journal Rarely does a book ring as true as Challenger Park. The characters are as real as our friends, family, and co workers. The story ropes us in from the start, but then guides us along rather than pulling tight. The writing is colorful when it needs to be, terse when it needs to be, and invisible when it needs to be an art in itself. Wichita Eagle Harrigan s precision reporting and lyrical writing make Challenger Park an absorbing read . If NASA ever decides to allow a writer on a space mission, my vote is for Stephen Harrigan. San Antonio Express News A finely crafted novel that gets to the core of what really matters in the end: friendship, family, and love . Novelists like John Updike, Ann Beattie and Anne Tyler our leading chroniclers of the human heart will need to make room for one more in their midst. New Jersey Star Ledger Harrigan takes the well trod landscape of suburban bedroom angst and gives it such a quirky makeover that the whole business of marital infidelity and family stability seems fresh eminently readable. St. Louis Post DispatchFrom the author of the acclaimed and best selling The Gates of the Alamo, a novel of extraordinary power about what it s like, and what it means, to journey into space as one of today s astronauts. At the novel s center: Lucy Kincheloe, an astronaut married to an astronaut, the loving mother of two young children, with a fierce ambition to excel in the space program. Her husband, Brian, a rigorous man whose dreams of glory have been blighted by two star crossed missions. Walt Womack, the steady, unflappable leader of the training team that prepares Lucy for her first shuttle flight. Lucy has devoted years of intense and focused effort to win her place on a mission, but as her lifelong dream of flying in space comes true, her familiar world appears to be falling apart around her. Her marriage is deteriorating. Her son s asthma is growing more serious. Her relationship with Walt Womack is becoming dangerously intimate. And when at last she is in space, 240 miles above the earth, and an accident renders the world she left behind appallingly distant perhaps unreachable her spirit is tested in gripping and unexpected ways. In The Gates of the Alamo, Stephen Harrigan s narrative authority brought a vanished nineteenth century Texas to vibrant life. In Challenger Park, he does the same with the world of space flight, bringing us up close to the lives the risks, the friendships, the rituals, the training of the astronauts and the people who work with them. Harrigan has written an exciting indeed a thrilling novel about the contrary pulls of home and adventure, reality and dreams, and the unimaginable experience, the joys and terrors and revelations, of space flight itself.

Remember Ben Clayton

From the author of the acclaimed best seller The Gates of the Alamo, a new novel that confirms and enlarges Stephen Harrigan’s reputation as a major voice in American fiction. Francis Gil Gilheaney is a sculptor of boundless ambition. But bad fortune and his own prideful spirit have driven him from New York into artistic exile in Texas just after World War I. His adult daughter, Maureen, serves as his assistant, although she has artistic ambitions of her own and is beginning to understand how her own career perhaps even her life has become hostage to her driven father s wild pursuit of glory. When Lamar Clayton, an aging, heartbroken rancher, offers Gil a commission to create a memorial statue of his son Ben, who was killed in the war, Gil seizes the opportunity to create what he believes will be his greatest achievement. As work proceeds on the statue, Gil and Maureen come to realize that their new client is a far more complicated man than he appeared to be on first acquaintance, and that Lamar is guarding a secret that haunts his relationship with his son even in death. But Gil is haunted as well: by the fear that his work will be forgotten and by an unconscionable lie whose discovery could cost him his daughter s love. The creation of the statue leads to a chain of dramatic encounters, through which Maureen will test the boundaries of her independence and Gil and Lamar, each in his own painful way, will confront their worth as fathers. Remember Ben Clayton vividly depicts a rich swath of American history, from the days when the Comanches ruled the Southern plains to the final brutal months of World War I. It ranges from outlaw settlements on the Texas frontier to the caf s of Paris, from Indian encampments to artists ateliers to the forgotten battlefield in France where Ben Clayton died. It shows us the all consuming labor that a monumental work of sculpture demands and the price it exacts from both artist and patron. And with unforgettable power and compassion it presents a deeply moving story about the bonds between fathers and children, and about the power and purpose of art.

A Natural State

In this remarkable collection of essays, Stephen Harrigan explores, with an unfailing depth of feeling, the human longing to feel at home in the world of nature. In vivid and convincing prose, he evokes the landscape of his home territory, Texas, and his own reactions, sometimes droll, sometimes haunted, to the extraordinary power of place that Texas projects. A Natural State was originally published in hardcover in 1988 by Texas Monthly Press.

Water and Light

This evocative account of the months Stephen Harrigan spent diving on the coral reefs off Grand Turk Island in the Caribbean was originally published by Houghton Mifflin in 1992.

Comanche Midnight

‘The essays in Comanche Midnight address my old preoccupations with worlds that have vanished, communication that is sealed off, perceptions that are out of reach. There is an air of mystery about them…
They are a record not just of certain events and people and places, but of the mind that witnessed them, and that is still trying to grasp what it beheld.’ from the Introduction Writing timeless essays that capture vanished worlds and elusive perceptions, Stephen Harrigan is emerging as a national voice with an ever expanding circle of enthusiastic readers. For those who have already experienced the pleasures of his writing and especially for those who haven’t Comanche Midnight collects fifteen pieces that originally appeared in the pages of Texas Monthly, Travel Holiday, and Audubon magazines. The worlds Harrigan describes in these essays may be vanishing, but his writing invests them with an enduring reality. He ranges over topics from the past glories and modern day travails of America’s most legendary Indian tribe to the poisoning of Austin’s beloved Treaty Oak, from the return to the past realism of the movie set of Lonesome Dove to the intimate, off season languor of Monte Carlo. If the personal essay can be described as journalism about that which is timeless, then Stephen Harrigan is a reporter of people, events, and places that will be as newsworthy years from now as they are today. Read Comanche Midnight and see if you don’t agree.

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