Main Line West

By Paul Horgan

Paul Horgan was very much a man of the American Southwest, living there most of his career and setting many of his works there. In those Southwestern spaces, he wrote, “great as they are, a person stands in relief like an earth feature, small, perhaps, but strongly lighted and as strongly shadowed.” Horgan was also very much a Catholic, and he saw and wrote about life according to the light which his religion granted him. These two powers of region and religion bear fruit in his Mountain Standard Time trilogy: Main Line West, Far From Cibola, and The Common Heart. Set in the Southwest, that land “alight with the quality of legend, made of hard mountains and cruel distances,” each novel tells its own story, yet characters and episodes all share in the grandeur, humility, and uncanny influence typical of Horgan’s rare talent. 

Their lives were like the vine which grows close on the earth; wandering far from its root, and striking into new sunlight and shade and fastening upon other growing things which when the root is cut will keep the vine striving forward.

The first in the MST set, Main Line West is an ode to the love of mother and son, indomitable in the face of the pangs and pains of the human situation, whose determined casting in the roiling, tumbling waters of life is destined for a bitter end. First published in 1936, Main Line West has been acclaimed as “a creation of magnificent proportions” and “a truly great novel of people whose lives flourish directly and simply from the earth and from the heart.” 

Paul Horgan (1903–1995) was an American Catholic historian and novelist, praised by David McCullough as “a writer of large vision and many-sidedness” with a match­less “command of language and feeling for human nature.” Author of forty-plus books, including seventeen novels, Horgan received two Pulitzer Prizes, as well as nineteen honorary degrees and the University of Notre Dame’s Laetare Medal.

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Paperback: 242pp.

ISBN: 978-1685954147