The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones

“[An] unsentimental, elegiac tale of a legendary gunslinger’s final days . . . Neider’s timeless novel sneaks up on readers with a kind of elliptical genius that simultaneously celebrates and subverts its mythos, anticipating and surpassing many of the revisionist Westerns that were to follow.” —David Wright, Library Journal, Starred Review

The 1950s classic that rewrote the myth of the American West and inspired its subsequent chroniclers from Sam Peckinpah to Marlon Brando to Cormac McCarthy.

Hendry Jones isn’t quite Billy the Kid, but he’s “the Kid” all the same, and like Billy’s his story doesn’t take long to tell. He’ll do a fair amount of killing, be done in by an old friend, then get turned into a myth before his body is cold. Years later, one of the Kid’s last living partners in crime, “Doc” Baker—old and less than sober—tries to set the record straight: who killed who and why, and how none of that old craziness is worth swooning over or rehashing. Except that Doc is a bit of a poet despite himself, and in drawing together what he knows and remembers about the Kid’s last days, he winds up saying just about everything that needs to be said about the American West, about kids playing with guns, about boys playing at being men out on the frontier, where they thought no one was watching.

As Will Oldham—whose moniker as a musician, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, was partly inspired by Billy the Kid—notes in his introduction, Hendry Jones served as fodder for a field of artists grappling with masculinity and violence in the West: Marlon Brando’s One-Eyed Jacks, Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian are all impossible to imagine without Neider’s Kid having first blazed the trail. A concise and brutal modern masterpiece, The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones is one of the few Western novels worthy of the name.

Charles Neider was born in Odessa, in what was then Russia, in 1915. His family emigrated to the United States when he was five years old, moving to Richmond, Virginia. In addition to being a novelist, Neider was an essayist, nature writer, and leading Mark Twain scholar. Over the course of his career, he published numerous books of fiction and nonfiction, edited collections of the work of Twain, Tolstoy, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Washington Irving, and made several trips to the Antarctic. He died in 2001.

Will Oldham has released more than twenty studio albums, along with EPs, singles, and music for film and television, performing, variously, as himself, Palace Brothers, or Bonnie “Prince” Billy. He is a longtime denizen of Louisville, Kentucky.