Classic Stories of the American West Audiobook

About the Authors

Stephen Crane (1871–1900) was an American novelist, poet, and journalist. He worked as a reporter of slum life in New York and a highly paid war correspondent for newspaper tycoons William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. He wrote many works of fiction, poems, and accounts of war, all well received but none as acclaimed as his 1895 Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage. Today he is considered one of the most innovative American writers of the 1890s and one of the founders of literary realism.

Bret Harte (1836–1902) was born in Albany, New York, and was raised in New York City. He had no formal education, but he inherited a love for books. Harte wrote for the San Franciscan Golden Era paper. There he published his first condensed novels, which were brilliant parodies of the works of well-known authors, such as Dickens and Cooper. Later, he became clerk in the US branch mint. This job gave Harte time to also work for the Overland Monthly, where he published his world-famous “Luck of the Roaring Camp” and commissioned Mark Twain to write weekly articles. In 1871, Harte was hired by the Atlantic Monthly for $10,000 to write twelve stories a year, which was the highest figure paid to an American writer at the time.

Jack London (1876–1916) was an American author, journalist, and social activist. Before making a living at his writing, he spent time as an oyster pirate, a sailor, a cannery worker, a gold miner, and a journalist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction writing. He is best known for his novels The Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set during the Klondike gold rush, as well as the short stories “To Build a Fire,” “An Odyssey of the North,” and “Love of Life.”  He also wrote of the South Pacific in such stories as “The Pearls of Parlay” and “The Heathen.” He was a passionate advocate of unionization, socialism, and the rights of workers and wrote several powerful works dealing with these topics, including The Iron Heel, The People of the Abyss, and The War of the Classes.

About the Narrators

David Birney is an American actor and director whose career performances include both contemporary and classical roles in theater, film and television. He has recorded numerous audiobook bestsellers, including works by Dean Koontz, Paul Theroux, Annie Dillard, Thomas Kenneally, and Orson Scott Card. His reading of Julie Salomon’s The Christmas Tree was honored with the prestigious Audie Award and has also been the recipient of several AudioFile Earphone Awards.

Robert Forster is an award-winning film and television actor best known for his Oscar-nominated supporting role as Max Cherry in Jackie Brown.

Arte Johnson is an award-winning narrator and an American comic actor who won an Emmy Award for his role in the television series Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. His audiobook narations have won two AudioFile Earphones Awards, and he placed as a finalist for the Audie Award for best narration in 2003 and 2007.

Stephen Hoye has worked as a professional actor in London and Los Angeles for more than thirty years. Trained at Boston University and the Guildhall in London, he has acted in television series and six feature films and has appeared in London’s West End. His audiobook narration has won him fifteen AudioFile Earphones Awards.

Stefan Rudnicki first became involved with audiobooks in 1994. Now a Grammy-winning audiobook producer, he has worked on more than five thousand audiobooks as a narrator, writer, producer, or director. He has narrated more than nine hundred audiobooks. A recipient of multiple AudioFile Earphones Awards, he was presented the coveted Audie Award for solo narration in 2005, 2007, and 2014, and was named one of AudioFile’s Golden Voices in 2012.

Emmy Award winner William Windom is a consummate actor whose long career has won him critical acclaim and audience approval, although he prefers to describe it as “95 percent approval and a few arrows along the way.” His television credits include Star Trek, All in the Family, Highway to Heaven, and My World and Welcome to It, for which he won an Emmy Award as Best Actor a Comedy series. Windom lives in Northern California with his wife Patricia and youngest son, Rebel, and near (perhaps too near!) his three grown children.

Rex Linn, a winner of the prestigious Audie Award for best narration in 2014, is an American film and television actor best known for his role as Frank Tripp in the television series CSI: Miami. Besides numerous other television roles, he has had roles in Django Unchained, Trial by Fire, and other major films. He was born and raised in the Texas panhandle and earned a BA in radio, television, and film from Oklahoma State University.