Seven-time Spur Award and four-time Western Heritage Award winner Elmer Kelton has written over 40 novels over the past 50 years, including The Texas Rangers, the Hewey Calloway, and the Buckalew Family series, his memoir Sandhills Boy, and his newest novel, Many A River. Kelton will be the Tucson Festival of Books guest of honor at the Writing Westerns: A Conversation with a Living Legend, Elmer Kelton panel in the Gallagher Theatre on Sunday, March 15th at 10 a.m.

BOOKMANS: You once said in an interview that the Western isn't respected in "polite literary circles."

ELMER KELTON: The reason I said the Western is not respected in polite literary circles is that the critical establishment long ago branded the Western as juvenile or "trash writing," judging it by the standards of the early pulp magazine days. Rarely does a book labeled Western receive honest and unbiased attention by mainline reviewers.

The industry itself bears part of the blame, often using violent, sensational covers and even book titles which reinforce the negative image. It is true that old-formula Westerns still are being published, but many books of real literary quality are overlooked on the assumption that they are "just another Western." This prejudice goes back more than a hundred years to the "penny dreadful" magazine stories written by Ned Buntline and others in the late 1800s.

BOOKMANS: How do you personally define a "true" Western?

KELTON: The term "Western" covers anything written with a Western setting, whether it is an action-type story or not. The "traditional" Western usually is action oriented to some degree. Today's better ones, though, deal much more with character, history, and even philosophy.

BOOKMANS: How do you feel about the state of regional literature? Is there a new generation of writers coming up that you feel are writing true regional fiction?

KELTON: We have always had regional writers, from Mark Twain on up to Eudora Welty and Wm. Faulkner. I regard Western writers as regional writers if their story is grounded in a real place, a real situation, and peopled by characters who have been shaped by their environment. There is danger in being labeled a regional writer, however. To many critics, to be regional is to be provincial, unless the setting is New York or LA.

Jesse Stuart is provincial. Woody Allen is not. Why? I have no clue.

BOOKMANS: In 2007, you published your memoir, Sandhills Boy. Did you enjoy the experience of writing your story? Were there aspects you found difficult and/or surprising?

KELTON: I had resisted for years writing my memoirs. Once I got into them, however, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. I did not intend it to be a "tell-all" type of book, and it isn't. I enjoyed reliving stories about people I have known, and of course my meeting and eventually marrying an Austrian woman whose life experience had been vastly different from my own. (We will have been married 62 years in July.)

BOOKMANS: Your books often have a strong undercurrent of family and relationships - what makes the connection between the two brothers of Many A River, your newest novel, unique?

KELTON: I have dealt in family and relationships in my novels because the interaction between people is the story. There has to be conflict of some kind if a story is to have suspense and hold a reader's interest. This conflict can be physical, or it may be emotional.  It may be between opposing ideas and goals. It may be between man and nature. But without it, in some form, there is no story.

I feel that Many a River is the best novel I have written in several years. The reason is the separation of the two brothers, and the reader's (and my) hope to bring them back together at the end. For a long time, as I was writing, I didn't know how I was going to bring it off. It was not until late in the book that I conceived the idea of bringing them together because of the war.

BOOKMANS: Are you comfortable with being called a "legend" of Western literature?

KELTON: I remember Somerset Maugham once commenting that old age had brought him more honors than his work ever had. If you live long enough that you outlast your contemporaries, you become the "dean" of whatever profession you happen to be in. I am going on 83.

Visit Elmer Kelton's official website.