Paul Horgan

Paul George Vincent O'Shaughnessy Horgan (August 1, 1903 – March 8, 1995) was an American writer of historical fiction and non-fiction who mainly wrote about the Southwestern United States. He was the recipient of two Pulitzer Prizes for History.

Historian David McCullough wrote of Horgan in 1989: "With the exception of Wallace Stegner, no living American has so distinguished himself in both fiction and history."

Biography Paul Horgan was born in Buffalo, New York, to a Catholic family on August 1, 1903. After his father contracted tuberculosis, the family moved in 1915 to Albuquerque, New Mexico for health reasons. Horgan attended New Mexico Military Institute in Roswell, New Mexico, where he formed a lifelong friendship with classmate and future artist Peter Hurd. Horgan befriended physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer in 1922 during a visit to New Mexico. After finishing high school, Horgan spent a year working for a local newspaper.

In 1924, Horgan returned to Albuquerque. He published his first novel, The Fault of Angels, about his experiences in Rochester in 1923; it won the Harper Prize. He continued to write 17 novels plus other works over the next five decades. Horgan served as president of the American Catholic Historical Association.

During World War II, Horgan moved to Washington, D.C., to serve as the head of the Army Information Branch of the US War Department. He would eventually receive the Legion of Merit and be promoted to lieutenant colonel. The author Charles Barber served as a personal assistant to Horgan when Barber was a college student. During this period, Horgan also taught seminars and workshops at Yale University and the University of Iowa.

Horgan published 40 books and received 19 honorary degrees from universities in the United States. He received a papal knighthood from Pope Pius XII. Horgan died at Middlesex County Hospital in Middletown, Connecticut, on March 8, 1995.

One of Horgan's most popular works was A Distant Trumpet, a historical novel based on the Apache wars in the Southwest. Horgan's 1972 book Encounters With Stravinsky, a biography of composer Igor Stravinsky, was called "an utterly irresistible book" by New York Times reviewer Simon Karlinsky.

Fiction The Fault of Angels (1933) No Quarter Given (1935) The Return of the Weed (1936), short stories Main Line West (1936) A Lamp on the Plains (1937) Far from Cibola (1938) The Habit of Empire (1939) Figures in the Landscape (1940) The Common Heart (1942) Devil in the Desert (1950) Things As They Are (1951) One Red Rose for Christmas (1952) The Saintmaker's Christmas Eve (1955) (translated into German by Annemarie Böll as Weihnachtsabend in San Cristobal) Give Me Possession (1957) A Distant Trumpet (1960) Mountain Standard Time (1962), contains Main Line West, Far from Cibola, and The Common Heart Toby and the Nighttime (1963), juvenile Memories of the Future (1966) The Peach Stone: Stories from Four Decades (1967), short stories Everything to Live For (1968) Whitewater (1970) The Thin Mountain Air (1977) Mexico Bay (1982) The Clerihews of Paul Horgan (1985) light verse The Richard Trilogy (1990) contains Things As they Are, Everything to Live For, and The Thin Mountain Air

Nonfiction Men of Arms (1931) From the Royal City (1936) New Mexico's Own Chronicle (with historian Maurice Garland Fulton) (1937) Diary and Letters of Josiah Gregg, 1840-1847 (1941) Look at America: The Southwest (1947) Great River: The Rio Grande in North American History (1951) The Centuries of Santa Fe (1956) Rome Eternal (1959) Citizen of New Salem (1961) Conquistadors in North American History (1963) Songs After Lincoln (1965) Peter Hurd: A Portrait Sketch from Life (1965), about the painter Peter Hurd Maurice Baring Restored (editor) (1969), about the poet Maurice Baring The Heroic Triad. Essays in the Social Energies of Three Southwestern Cultures (1970) Encounters with Stravinsky (1972) about the composer Igor Stravinsky Approaches to Writing (1974) Lamy of Santa Fe: His Life and Times (1975), about Archbishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy Josiah Gregg and His Vision of the Early West (1979), about the explorer Josiah Gregg Henriette Wyeth (1980) about the painter Henriette Wyeth On the Climate of Books (1981), essays Of America: East & West (1984) Under the Sangre de Cristo (1985) A Certain Climate (1988), essays A Writer's Eye (1988) Tracings: A Book of Partial Portraits (1993)