Max Evans — The Rounders (1960), The Hi Lo Country (1961), Bluefeather Fellini (1993) & The King of Taos (2020)

By Josh Eldred · New Mexico Literacy Project · · ~6,200 words

Last verified May 2026 · Original research by Josh Eldred

In 1960 Macmillan in New York published a short modern-Western novel by a thirty-six-year-old Taos painter and former D-Day infantryman named Max Evans. The Rounders followed two aging cowboys working a ranch in northeastern New Mexico — Ben Jones and Howdy Lewis — and became one of the foundational mid-century post-Western novels, basis for the 1965 Burt Kennedy MGM film starring Glenn Ford and Henry Fonda. The following year Macmillan published Evans's follow-up, The Hi Lo Country, which Sam Peckinpah would option and try and fail to film for the next twenty-three years before his 1984 death; Stephen Frears finally made the film in 1998 with Woody Harrelson, Billy Crudup, Patricia Arquette, and Sam Elliott, with Martin Scorsese producing. Across the next sixty years Evans wrote sixteen more books — including the late metaphysical Bluefeather Fellini trilogy, the major biographical study Madam Millie, the Peckinpah memoir Goin' Crazy, and his final novel The King of Taos (UNM Press 2020), which won the 2021 Western Heritage Award for Outstanding Western Novel posthumously. He died at the Albuquerque VA Medical Center on August 26, 2020, three days short of his ninety-sixth birthday. This is the collector's reference.

Ropesville to Omaha Beach to Taos: A Life

Max Allen Evans (August 29, 1924 — August 26, 2020, closed pool) was born in Ropesville, Hockley County, in the Texas Panhandle, the son of Walter Burnace "W.B." Evans and Hazel Glenn Swafford Evans. The family had a younger daughter Glenda Rhue. Evans grew up in the cattle country of the eastern New Mexico-Texas Panhandle borderland, did his earliest cowboy work as a teenager during the late 1930s, and was barely twenty when the United States entered World War II.

He enlisted in the United States Army infantry, was trained for the European Theater, and landed at Omaha Beach on D-Day (June 6, 1944) — the most consequential military operation of the twentieth century, conducted by a young Texas-New Mexico cowboy who would carry the experience into the rest of his life and his writing. Evans was wounded twice during the European campaign and was discharged at war's end. He returned to New Mexico, married Pat James in 1949 (the marriage lasted seventy-one years until his 2020 death; the couple raised twin daughters Sheryl and Charlotte), and resumed cowboy work in the Hi-Lo country of northeastern New Mexico — the high-plains-and-mesa cattle country in the Mora-Wagon Mound-Roy-Mosquero-Tucumcari arc on the eastern flanks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

In the early 1950s Evans moved to Taos and shifted from full-time cowboying to painting. He worked seriously as an oil painter in the Taos artist colony — the same colony that had absorbed D.H. Lawrence (1920s, see /dh-lawrence-taos-kiowa-ranch-collecting), Mabel Dodge Luhan, Frank Waters (see /frank-waters-man-who-killed-deer-collecting), Bert Phillips, Joseph Henry Sharp, and the painters of the Taos Society of Artists. Evans sold over three hundred oil paintings and made his living as a working artist for approximately nine years. His paintings remain in private collections across New Mexico and in some museum holdings; he is one of the few American novelists who could plausibly have had a parallel career as a regional painter.

Evans's transition from painting to writing occurred in the late 1950s. His first book — the regional biography Long John Dunn of Taos — appeared from Westernlore Press in Los Angeles in 1959. His second book, The Rounders, appeared from Macmillan in 1960 and put him on the national modern-Western map. He remained based in Taos until his late years; he died at the Veterans Administration Medical Center hospice in Albuquerque on August 26, 2020 (a Wednesday), three days short of his ninety-sixth birthday and ten days after his final book The King of Taos was published.

Evans's friendship circle across the mid-century included a substantial Hollywood-Taos film community: director Sam Peckinpah (the longest and closest of the friendships, lasting from the early 1960s through Peckinpah's 1984 death); actors Brian Keith, Lee Marvin, Joel McCrea, and James Coburn; and a broad network of Western-letters figures from Western Writers of America membership and Wrangler Award circles.

Long John Dunn of Taos (Westernlore 1959)

Long John Dunn of Taos (Westernlore Press, Los Angeles, 1959 first edition) is Max Evans's first book — a biographical study of Long John Dunn (1857-1953), the legendary Taos pioneer, stagecoach operator, saloon-keeper, gambler, and freelance character of the territorial-into-early-statehood era. Dunn had arrived in Taos in the late nineteenth century, run the Taos-to-Santa Fe stage line, operated saloons and gambling halls in Taos and surrounding towns, and had become by the time of his 1953 death one of the most-recognized hometown figures of twentieth-century Taos. Evans had known Dunn personally in the early 1950s and worked from his own conversations with Dunn as primary source material.

Westernlore Press was the Los Angeles-based regional history publisher run by Paul Bailey that specialized in Western Americana across the 1950s through 1970s — Westernlore titles are a recognized collector series of mid-century Western regional history. The 1959 Westernlore Long John Dunn of Taos was Evans's introduction to the Western-letters publishing world and is now scarce — early Evans collectors and Taos local-history collectors both pursue it.

The Rounders (Macmillan 1960) and the 1965 MGM Film

The Rounders (Macmillan, New York, 1960 first edition, 153 pages, tan cloth, illustrated by Charles W. Walker) is Max Evans's second book and the work that established him as a major modern-Western novelist. The book is a short, tight, vernacular-voiced novel that follows two aging cowboys — Ben Jones and Howdy Lewis — working a ranch in northeastern New Mexico for the parsimonious owner Jim Ed Love.

The Rounders is widely cited as one of the foundational "post-Western" or "modern Western" novels — cowboys still exist as a working occupation, the cattle work is still real, but the nineteenth-century frontier framing has dissolved — a shift that Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy would later push even further, the cultural world is contracting, and the old categorical certainties no longer organize the experience. Evans's two cowboys are competent, weary, occasionally ridiculous, and aware that their world is on the way out. The novel anticipated by a decade-plus the Larry McMurtry / Edward Abbey / Wallace Stegner / John Nichols modern-Western fictional turn of the 1960s and 1970s.

Points of issue for the 1960 Macmillan first edition:

  1. Macmillan imprint on title page, New York.
  2. 1960 copyright page with first-edition designation.
  3. 153 pages.
  4. Original tan cloth binding with gilt-stamped spine.
  5. Charles W. Walker illustrations (line drawings throughout).
  6. Original Macmillan dust jacket (scarce in fine condition; surviving jacketed copies command meaningful premium over unjacketed firsts).

The 1965 MGM film. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer adapted The Rounders in 1965, with screenplay and direction by Burt Kennedy (the screenwriter of multiple Budd Boetticher / Randolph Scott Westerns of the 1950s and one of the most consistent Western-film craftsmen of the mid-century). The film starred Glenn Ford as Ben Jones and Henry Fonda as Howdy Lewis, with Sue Ane Langdon as Mary, Hope Holiday as Sister, Chill Wills as Jim Ed Love, Edgar Buchanan as Vince Moore, and Denver Pyle. Cinematography by Paul Vogel; music by Jeff Alexander.

The Rounders 1965 was a popular and critical success and consolidated The Rounders as one of the defining 1960s modern-Western films. The Glenn Ford / Henry Fonda pairing — Ford as the smart-mouthed Ben Jones and Fonda as the wearier Howdy Lewis — is one of the great mid-century Western buddy-pairings and is regularly cited in Henry Fonda filmography retrospectives. The film generated a Macmillan film-tie-in edition and a Random House paperback edition in 1965; these are not the 1960 Macmillan first edition and should not be sold as such.

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The Hi Lo Country (Macmillan 1961) and the 1998 Stephen Frears Film

The Hi Lo Country (Macmillan, New York, 1961 first edition) is Max Evans's most-celebrated novel and the book that critics consistently rank as the apex of mid-twentieth-century New Mexico cowboy fiction. The novel is set in the Hi-Lo country of northeastern New Mexico — the high-plains-and-mesa cattle country that gave the book its title — in the immediate post-World War II years (Evans's own ranching years). The plot follows two cowboys, Big Boy Matson and Pete Calder, riding out the last decade of the open-range cattle economy. The triangle plot centers on Big Boy, Pete, and Mona Birk, the wife of the local ranch foreman, and works through to a fatal conclusion that has the quality of a contemporary Western tragedy.

The Hi Lo Country is a substantively longer and more ambitious book than The Rounders. Where The Rounders is a tight comic-and-elegiac portrait of two specific cowboys at the end of a workday, The Hi Lo Country is a full-scale post-war novel with multiple working ranches, a dozen secondary characters, the cattle-and-bank economy of the eastern New Mexico high plains, and a tragic central plot that runs from the immediate post-1945 demobilization through the late 1940s. The book is also Evans's most directly autobiographical novel — Big Boy Matson is widely understood to be partly modeled on Evans's friend and ranching partner during his Hi-Lo years.

The thirty-seven-year road to the film. Director Sam Peckinpah (February 21, 1925 — December 28, 1984) optioned the film rights to The Hi Lo Country in the early 1960s and held them for the next twenty-three years through repeated production attempts that failed to come together. Peckinpah believed The Hi Lo Country was the great American post-war cowboy novel and was the right project to follow The Wild Bunch (1969), Junior Bonner (1972), and Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973); he attempted production setups in the late 1960s, the mid-1970s, and the early 1980s, each of which collapsed for funding, cast, or studio reasons. Peckinpah died in 1984 without making the film.

After Peckinpah's death the rights eventually transferred. In the mid-1990s Martin Scorsese — a long-time Peckinpah admirer — produced the project for Polygram / Working Title Films, with British director Stephen Frears (My Beautiful Laundrette, The Grifters, Dangerous Liaisons) directing and Walon Green (one of the screenwriters of The Wild Bunch) writing the screenplay. The film was released in 1998 with a cast headed by Woody Harrelson as Big Boy Matson, Billy Crudup as Pete Calder, Patricia Arquette as Mona Birk, Penélope Cruz, Cole Hauser, Sam Elliott, Enrique Castillo, and Katy Jurado.

The film was a critical success in the international art-cinema circuit. Stephen Frears won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 49th Berlin International Film Festival (1999); Billy Crudup won the National Board of Review's Best Breakthrough Performance award for his Pete Calder. The film's domestic American theatrical run was modest, but its critical reception and its standing in the modern-Western canon have grown across the subsequent decades.

The 1961 Macmillan first with original dust jacket is the apex Max Evans collector trophy. The book carries dual collector demand from Evans collectors, Western literature collectors, Sam Peckinpah collectors (for the option-history and the eventual Walon Green / Working Title production), and Stephen Frears film collectors. Some sources cite the publication year as 1962 rather than 1961; the 1961 Macmillan first is the publishing-record first edition.

Three Short Novels (Houghton Mifflin 1963) and the Mid-Career Bibliography

Three Short Novels: The Great Wedding, The One-Eyed Sky, My Pardner (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1963 first edition) is Max Evans's mid-career omnibus of three novella-length works. The Great Wedding is a comic-and-elegiac novella in the Rounders mode; The One-Eyed Sky is a longer New Mexico story with some of Evans's strongest landscape writing; My Pardner is a cowboy buddy-novella. The 1963 Houghton Mifflin first is the principal collector target for any of the three novellas — they have not been issued separately in standalone first editions.

Shadow of Thunder (Swallow Press 1969) and Mountain of Gold (1965) round out the mid-1960s Evans bibliography. Xavier's Folly and Other Stories (1984) is the late-1980s short-fiction collection. Super Bull and Other True Escapades (1985 — the year sometimes cited as 1979 by less reliable sources) is the autobiographical-essay collection of Evans's cowboy-and-painter years.

The Bluefeather Fellini Trilogy (1993-2016)

Across the 1990s and into the 2010s Max Evans built the late-career Bluefeather Fellini trilogy — three substantial novels published by the University Press of Colorado and the University of New Mexico Press that deliberately move beyond the modern-Western realist mode of The Rounders and The Hi Lo Country into a more metaphysical, more mythic late-career key.

Bluefeather Fellini (University Press of Colorado, 1993 first edition) introduces the protagonist Bluefeather Fellini, a half-Indian / half-Italian cowboy, prospector, and itinerant Westerner born in New Mexico in 1918. The deliberately constructed multi-cultural inheritance — Native and Italian and broadly Hispano-Anglo — makes Bluefeather a figure carrying the full mid-twentieth-century Southwest's cultural mixing in a single biography. The novel covers Bluefeather's life from his New Mexico boyhood through the post-war Rocky Mountain prospecting economy and the contemporary American Southwest.

Bluefeather Fellini in the Sacred Realm (University Press of Colorado, 1994 first edition) is the sequel — a more explicitly metaphysical continuation of Bluefeather's story into late-life narrative territory. The 1994 UPress of Colorado first is a Tier 2 collector target.

Bluefeather Fellini in the Crocodile's Eye (University of New Mexico Press 2016) is the third Bluefeather volume — Evans returned to Bluefeather more than twenty years after the second novel for a late-late-career third installment. Published when Evans was ninety-one years old.

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Madam Millie (UNM Press 2002) and the Late Non-Fiction

Madam Millie: Bordellos from Silver City to Ketchikan (University of New Mexico Press, 2002) is Max Evans's biographical study of Mildred Clark Cusey ("Madam Millie"), the New Mexico-and-Western brothel madam who across the mid-twentieth century operated five houses on Hudson Street in Silver City, New Mexico, plus establishments in Deming NM, across Wyoming, and as far north as Ketchikan, Alaska.

Cusey had been orphaned as a child in the 1910s, worked as a Harvey Girl waitress on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway during the 1920s (the same Harvey Company that employed Erna Fergusson's Indian Detours Couriers — see /erna-fergusson-dancing-gods-collecting), and entered the brothel business in the late 1920s when economic conditions and her own circumstances pushed her in that direction. She built one of the most extensive Western brothel networks of the mid-twentieth century and operated through the 1970s before retiring. Evans interviewed Cusey from 1975 until shortly before her 1993 death at approximately age eighty-seven; the resulting biography is the principal published treatment of her life.

Madam Millie is the most-cited primary source in New Mexico mid-twentieth-century sex-work history and is also a major source for Harvey Girl history, Silver City local history (the Silver City brothels operated at the edge of legality through the 1940s and 1950s and were a substantial local institution), and Ketchikan Alaska territorial-and-early-statehood history.

This Chosen Place: Finding Shangri-La on the 4UR (University Press of Colorado 2001), For the Love of a Horse (UNM Press 2006), and Now and Forever (UNM Press 2008) are Evans's late memoir-and-essay collections. Hi Lo Country: Under the One-Eyed Sky (UNM Press, with photographs by Jan Haley) is the late illustrated regional treatment of the Hi-Lo country geography that anchored Evans's early novels.

Goin' Crazy with Sam Peckinpah and All My Friends (UNM Press 2014)

Goin' Crazy with Sam Peckinpah and All My Friends (University of New Mexico Press, 2014 first edition, co-authored with Santa Fe New Mexican film critic Robert Nott) is Max Evans's memoir of his thirty-year friendship with director Sam Peckinpah. The book is one of the principal primary sources for Peckinpah biography — a substantial portrait of Peckinpah by one of his closest non-Hollywood friends — and is also one of the principal self-portraits of Evans's Taos-Hollywood crossover years. The book won the 2015 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for Biography.

Goin' Crazy covers the early-1960s friendship formation, the multiple decades of failed Hi Lo Country production attempts, the drinking-and-hunting Western-film circle of mid-century Hollywood-Taos figures (Brian Keith, Lee Marvin, Joel McCrea, James Coburn, and others), Peckinpah's late-career decline through the 1970s and early 1980s, and Peckinpah's December 28, 1984 death. The book is Evans's most-cited late-career work outside of the Bluefeather trilogy and an essential primary source for Peckinpah scholarship.

The King of Taos (UNM Press 2020) — The Final Novel

The King of Taos (University of New Mexico Press, 2020) is Max Evans's final novel — published in the months immediately before his August 26, 2020 death and posthumous winner of the 2021 Western Heritage Award for Outstanding Western Novel from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. The book is a late-career synthesis of Evans's working-cowboy material, his Taos artist-colony material, and his Hi-Lo country geographic material; it is set in mid-twentieth-century Taos and treats the Anglo-artist-and-cowboy intersection in the village that Evans had known continuously for seventy years.

The posthumous 2021 Western Heritage Award is Evans's final major recognition. The award completed a cycle in which Evans had been recognized by essentially every major Western literary body across his sixty-five-year writing career — the Western Writers of America Saddleman Award (1990), the Spur Award (multiple), the Owen Wister Award, the Wrangler Award (multiple), and the 2015 induction into the Western Writers of America Hall of Fame.

A related volume that should not be confused with an Evans autobiography is Slim Randles, Ol' Max Evans: The First Thousand Years (University of New Mexico Press) — a biography of Evans by his friend Slim Randles, not an autobiography by Evans himself. The book was the basis for a 2017 PBS documentary on Evans's life.

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Three-Tier Collector Market

Tier 1 — mid three figures to low four figures with signed/inscribed material. The Hi Lo Country (Macmillan 1961) first edition in original dust jacket is the apex Max Evans literary collector trophy — the apex novel, the Sam Peckinpah / Stephen Frears dual film association, and the most-difficult-to-find-in-fine-jacketed-condition Macmillan first in Evans's bibliography. The Rounders (Macmillan 1960) first edition in original dust jacket — Evans's signature collector title, with the 1965 Glenn Ford / Henry Fonda MGM film association; tan cloth, 153 pages, Charles W. Walker illustrations. Long John Dunn of Taos (Westernlore Press 1959) first edition — Evans's first book, scarce, with substantial collector demand from Taos local-history collectors as well as Evans completionists. Signed inscribed copies of any of the Tier 1 titles command meaningful premium over unsigned; Evans was an active public figure and signed copies appear with some frequency, but the closed signature pool (2020) makes the supply finite.

Tier 2 — low to mid three figures. Three Short Novels (Houghton Mifflin 1963, containing The Great Wedding, The One-Eyed Sky, and My Pardner novellas — the only first-edition source for these three works); Shadow of Thunder (Swallow Press 1969); Xavier's Folly and Other Stories (1984); Super Bull and Other True Escapades; Bluefeather Fellini (University Press of Colorado 1993); Bluefeather Fellini in the Sacred Realm (UPress of Colorado 1994); Bluefeather Fellini in the Crocodile's Eye (UNM Press 2016); This Chosen Place (UPress of Colorado 2001); Madam Millie (UNM Press 2002); For the Love of a Horse (UNM Press 2006); Now and Forever (UNM Press 2008); Goin' Crazy with Sam Peckinpah and All My Friends (UNM Press 2014); The King of Taos (UNM Press 2020); Slim Randles, Ol' Max Evans: The First Thousand Years (UNM Press). Signed late-career UNM Press firsts command meaningful premium.

Tier 3 — under one hundred dollars. Mass-market paperback reprints of The Rounders and The Hi Lo Country (both have been in continuous paperback print since the 1960s in multiple publisher editions); 1965 Random House Rounders film-tie-in paperback; 1998 Polygram / Working Title Hi Lo Country film-tie-in paperback; UNM Press paperback reprints of the Bluefeather Fellini trilogy and other Evans titles; library-rebound copies; academic monographs and journal-issue retrospectives on Evans and modern-Western fiction.

Identification Problems and Authentication Cautions

The Macmillan reprint problem. The Rounders and The Hi Lo Country were both reprinted by Macmillan and by subsequent publishers across the 1960s through 1990s. The 1960 Macmillan Rounders first is identified by the 1960 copyright page with first-edition designation, the 153-page count, the tan cloth binding, and the Charles W. Walker illustrations intact. The 1961 Hi Lo Country first is identified by the 1961 copyright page with first-edition designation. Later printings are not first editions regardless of cloth color or jacket presence.

The 1965 Rounders film-tie-in problem. The 1965 MGM film of The Rounders generated a film-tie-in paperback (typically Random House or Pyramid) with film stills on the cover. These are 1965 tie-in editions, not 1960 firsts, and should not be sold as such.

The 1998 Hi Lo Country film-tie-in problem. Similarly, the 1998 Polygram film generated a Hi Lo Country tie-in paperback edition with film cover art. These are 1998 tie-in editions, not 1961 firsts.

The "Joseph Maxwell Evans" misattribution. Some online listings and reference works mis-cite Max Evans as "Joseph Maxwell Evans" — this is incorrect. His full legal name was Max Allen Evans; he never used "Joseph" or "Maxwell." Authentication of personal-paper material should match the Max Allen Evans signature pattern, not any "Joseph Maxwell" variant.

The Bluefeather trilogy publisher confusion. Bluefeather Fellini (1993) and Bluefeather Fellini in the Sacred Realm (1994) were University Press of Colorado; Bluefeather Fellini in the Crocodile's Eye (2016) was University of New Mexico Press. The trilogy spans two publishers and twenty-three years; collectors building the complete trilogy should not expect a single-publisher series.

NMLP Intake Position

Max Evans books appear in NMLP donation pickups regularly across the Albuquerque, Taos, and Santa Fe Anglo retiree donor base, with particularly heavy concentration in Taos and in the Hi-Lo country (Mora, Wagon Mound, Roy, Mosquero, Tucumcari, Las Vegas NM) ranching-family library accumulations. Evans was a substantial regional figure across his sixty-five-year writing career and remained an active Taos resident and public speaker until his late 2010s.

Donor surface: Taos Anglo retirees with Taos artist-colony, Mabel Dodge Luhan circle-adjacent, and working-cowboy library accumulation (Evans is the cowboy-side counterpart to the more famous Taos painter-and-writer figures and is a regular item in Taos estate pickups); Albuquerque Anglo professional retirees with Western Americana reading lists; UNM English Department and American Studies faculty estates; UNM Press subscription-donation accumulations (UNM Press has been Evans's primary late-career publisher); Hi-Lo country and northeastern NM ranching-family library accumulations — Evans is the foundational Hi-Lo country fiction writer and is read across the region as a hometown author; Sam Peckinpah and Glenn Ford / Henry Fonda film-collector estates with cross-collecting interest in the Rounders and Hi Lo Country source novels; Madam Millie / Silver City / Western history readers; and the substantial Western Writers of America membership network with multi-generational Evans collections.

Tier 1 routes to specialist literary-first-edition dealers and auction houses (Heritage Auctions Books and Manuscripts, William Reese Company New Haven, Lorne Bair Rare Books for Western Americana, Ken Sanders Rare Books Salt Lake City, PBA Galleries San Francisco, and local Albuquerque dealers including Treasure House Books in Old Town and Bookworks on Rio Grande Blvd). Tier 2 unsigned firsts and broader bibliography through SellBooksABQ at 5445 Edith NE, Unit A in Albuquerque. Tier 3 paperback reprints and film-tie-in editions to APS Title I schools (The Rounders and The Hi Lo Country are standard on NM literature reading lists), UNM classroom-set acquisitions, NM Historical Society institutional donations, Hi-Lo country library system donations, and the regional research-library partnership network. Donate your books or schedule a free statewide pickup — schedule your pickup or text/call 702-496-4214.

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Cite This Guide

Eldred, J. (May 2026). Max Evans — The Rounders (1960), The Hi Lo Country (1961), Bluefeather Fellini (1993) & The King of Taos (2020). New Mexico Literacy Project.

https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/max-evans-rounders-hi-lo-country-collecting

Content is original research by Josh Eldred. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. Cite with attribution.