The Happy Man

New York: The Viking Press. Near Fine in Very Good dj. 1943. First Edition. Hardcover. [nice clean book with just a touch of shelfwear; the jacket spine is tanned, with a couple of faint water spots and some shallow paper loss at both ends]. The first book by this author, who went on to write a great deal of non-fiction related to the American West. It's an episodic book, not so much a novel as a collection of interrelated stories (three of which had already been published in The Atlantic Monthly) about a ranch hand working on a large California ranch engaged in what we today would call "corporate farming": The El Dorado Investment Company, as it's called, "manufactures its beef -- manufactures it as smoothly and efficiently as Henry Ford rolls cars of his conveyor belt. Cowboys still ride the range at El Dorado, and the cattle still stampede when the dust storms roar in, but Diesel trailer-trucks move the herds around, hay is pitched a ton at a time, and the feed is as carefully balanced as a baby's formula." It was, of course, based on the author's own working life before he turned to writing. In conjunction with his writing, Easton was also a prominent environmental activist; he was also a son-in-law of the famous Western writer Frederick Faust (aka Max Brand). .