John Willingham

John Willingham is a novelist, essayist, and occasional historian. On August 15, 2025, TCU Press will publish his new historical novel, THE LAST WOMAN. Inspired by true events, The Last Woman is the story of three young women whose lives become intertwined as they flee up the Mississippi River in 1877. Within a year, two of them take off for Dodge City, reluctantly leaving their friend behind in St. Louis. Six decades later, the most adventurous soul among them, discarding her given name of Catherine, has become the last woman in Tascosa, Texas—once the wildest cowtown in the West. We meet her when she's eighty years old, re-living and reflecting on her past, the fate of her friends, and the perils of other women for whom escape to the West was an act born of desperation. She has been living under an alias since 1878, hoping that no one else will track her down.

His first novel, The Edge of Freedom, A Fact-Based Novel of the Texas Revolution, appeared in 2011, in time for him to be the featured author at the annual lecture and reenactment at the Presidio La Bahia in Goliad as part of the 175th anniversary of the Texas Revolution. In April 2012, a book review in Southwestern Historical Quarterly lauded the novel as "a compelling blend of historical sequence and imagination."