Andy Adams Biography

American novelist, born in Whitley County, Indiana. Adams gained his knowledge of the world ‘from the hurricane deck of a Texas horse’; his deep familiarity with the world of the cowboy and cattleman made him one of the few writers of cowboy fiction to have achieved real literary merit. He became a cowboy in Texas, then settled in Colorado from where he wrote The Log of a Cowboy (1903), an account of the cowboy's life structured around a cattle drive from the Rio Grande to Montana; it is narrated by the cowhand Tom Quirk, who reappears in The Matchmaker (1904) and in The Outlet (1905), a more complex work giving detailed depictions of the socio-political dimensions of the cattle drive. Cattle Brands (1906) is a collection of stories about frontier life in the late nineteenth century; Reed Anthony, Cowman: An Autobiography (1907) is the story of a Confederate army veteran who becomes an influential Texas cattle rancher.