Nueva Granada

In a delicate balance between old and new, Nueva Granada presents a long personal interview that has never before been published to complement a fresh, updated selection of Robert Franklin Gish's many essays and articles about Paul Horgan and his Southwestern writings. In a career that spans seven decades, Paul Horgan's fiction and non-fiction have provided readers with an ardent regard for the lives and landscapes, history and lore of the land the Spanish explorers called Nueva Granada. As Gish revisits Horgan's work, he discovers an evolving Southwest, a land filled with diversity and new perspectives. In No Quarter Given, A Distant Trumpet, The Peach Stone, Far from Cibola, Whitewater, Josiah Gregg and His Early West, The Thin Mountain Air, Conquistadors in North American History, Lamy of Santa Fe, Mexico Bay, and many other works, Horgan provides readers with a classic image of the West, but Gish shows us that Horgan transcends regions and touches on universal qualities. In fact, Gish stresses Horgan's recognition of a new West, a place that is not only dense with geographic diversity, but ethnic and cultural diversity as well. Both Horgan's work and Gish's critical essays and his interview with the author reveal the "heroic triad" of cultures. Nueva Granada explicitly explores Horgan's reactions to and portrayals of American Indian, Spanish/Mexican, and Anglo interrelationships in the old West that has now become new. Gish is a sensitive explorer as he travels the boundaries and borders of Horgan's fiction and history.