Max Evans, whose work "often addressed the challenges faced by men and women coming to grips with the postwar transition of the American West," died August 26 at age 95, the Santa Fe New Mexican reported.
His friend and Western fiction writer Johnny D. Boggs commented: "Evans showed publishers and readers that the American West didn't end by 1900. He told often-autobiographical fiction and nonfiction set during the Great Depression, World War II and beyond."
Evans drew on his own hardscrabble, hard-living life, which included stints as a soldier in Europe in World War II, a cowboy, a miner, an artist, a smuggler. "Evans was not so much a larger-than-life character than a life-like character who liked to see how far he could push the fun to be had every day," the paper wrote. "His send-off catchphrase was always: 'Have fun!' "
His first major novel was The Rounders, published in 1960, about "two contemporary cowboys who just want to live, love and avoid trouble, but whose simple dreams are foiled time and again by a rambunctious, impossible-to-tame horse," the New Mexican wrote. "The horse, like Evans himself, survives efforts to abandon and kill it and proves to the two hapless cowboys that the spirit of the Old West is pretty hard to extinguish." Glenn Ford and Henry Fonda played the two cowboys in a film version directed by Burt Kennedy.
His 1962 novel The Hi Lo Country was about two New Mexico cowboys returning home from combat service in World War II. "They are thrust into another battle to save the West they once knew as progress--in the form of larger corporate outfits and trucks--envelops the land," the paper noted.
Other books included the 2004 autobiography Ol' Max Evans--The First Thousand Years, written with Slim Randles; the nonfiction book Madam Millie: Bordellos From Silver City to Ketchikan; and Bluefeather Fellini, a collection of animal stories.
Evans's last novel, The King of Taos, was published June 1 by the University of New Mexico Press, which wrote, "Set in the late 1950s, the novel tells the stories of sharp-witted Zacharias Chacon, aspiring artist Shaw Spencer, and a circle of characters who drink, fight, love, argue, and--mostly--talk. Readers will enjoy this witty and moving evocation of unforgettable characters as they look for work, love, comfort, dignity, and bottomless oblivion."