Selling William Eastlake Books in Albuquerque: The Novelist of the Navajo Checkerboard

By Josh Eldred · New Mexico Literacy Project · May 30, 2026 · ~1,950 words

Last verified May 2026 · Original research by Josh Eldred, who has bought and sorted northern New Mexico estate libraries for a decade.

The Cuba ranch and the Checkerboard Trilogy

Eastlake was a Brooklyn-born, New Jersey-raised writer who worked the legendary Stanley Rose Bookstore in 1940s Los Angeles — a hangout for Nathanael West, Steinbeck, Saroyan, and Faulkner — landed at Omaha Beach, and was wounded in the Battle of the Bulge before he ever saw New Mexico. Then, in 1955, he bought a 400-acre ranch in the Jemez Mountains near Cuba, New Mexico, and the place changed his writing and his life. The ranch became a mecca for writers: Edward Abbey, the Black Mountain poet Robert Creeley, and the biologist Julian Huxley all passed through. The Navajo Checkerboard — the chessboard of alternating tribal, federal, and private land that surrounds Cuba — became his great subject.

Out of it came the Checkerboard Trilogy: Go in Beauty (Harper & Brothers, 1956), The Bronc People (Harcourt, Brace, 1958), and Portrait of an Artist with Twenty-Six Horses (Simon & Schuster, 1963). They are not conventional Westerns; they are spare, funny, surreal, and formally daring — closer to the experimental fiction of their era than to the ranch-realism of his neighbors — and they take the Navajo and the Anglo rancher equally seriously. The critic Larry McCaffery included the trilogy in his survey The 20th Century’s Greatest Hits: 100 English-Language Books of Fiction, the kind of recognition that keeps a “writer’s writer’s” first editions quietly in demand long after his name has faded from the bestseller shelves.

Castle Keep and the wider work

Eastlake’s widest fame came from a war novel. Castle Keep (Simon & Schuster, 1965), about American soldiers defending an art-filled Belgian castle during the Battle of the Bulge, was adapted into the 1969 Sydney Pollack film of the same name starring Burt Lancaster, Patrick O’Neal, Bruce Dern, and Peter Falk — the screen tie that makes the Castle Keep first the most recognizable Eastlake book to a general buyer. His Vietnam novel The Bamboo Bed (Simon & Schuster, 1969) followed, and he returned to New Mexico ground in Dancers in the Scalp House (Viking, 1975), a darker Checkerboard book. Late in life the Dalkey Archive Press gathered the trilogy as Lyric of the Circle Heart: The Bowman Family Trilogy (1996), the edition most readers meet him through today. He spent his last years in Bisbee, Arizona, and taught at the University of Arizona, whose Special Collections hold his papers.

First-edition identification

Eastlake moved among major trade houses, so identification is publisher-by-publisher. Three things decide an Eastlake first:

• Publisher and date match the title. Go in Beauty is Harper & Brothers (1956); The Bronc People is Harcourt, Brace (1958); Portrait of an Artist with Twenty-Six Horses, Castle Keep, and The Bamboo Bed are Simon & Schuster (1963, 1965, 1969); Dancers in the Scalp House and The Long, Naked Descent into Boston are Viking. Each house’s standard first-edition notation (number line or stated first printing on the copyright page) applies.
• The dust jacket is present and original. For an experimental literary author, condition and the jacket are decisive — a jacketed Go in Beauty or Portrait of an Artist with Twenty-Six Horses first is the collectible object; the same book rebound or jacketless is a reading copy.
• Don’t confuse the trilogy reissue with the firsts. The 1996 Dalkey Archive Lyric of the Circle Heart gathers all three Checkerboard novels in one volume — valuable as a reading edition and an in-print reference, but not the 1956–1963 trade firsts.

Signed or inscribed Eastlake is uncommon; association copies tied to the Cuba ranch circle — Abbey, Creeley, and the writers who visited — are the New Mexico trophies of the category.

The collector market — three tiers

Tier 1 — trophy: Go in Beauty (Harper & Brothers, 1956), Eastlake’s debut and the first Checkerboard novel, in dust jacket; Portrait of an Artist with Twenty-Six Horses (Simon & Schuster, 1963) in jacket; any signed or association copy from the Cuba ranch circle.

Tier 2 — collector: The Bronc People (Harcourt, Brace, 1958) in jacket, completing the trilogy; Castle Keep (Simon & Schuster, 1965) in jacket, the film book; The Bamboo Bed (1969) and Dancers in the Scalp House (Viking, 1975).

Tier 3 — reading copies and reprints: jacketless firsts, book-club and paperback reprints, and the 1996 Dalkey Archive trilogy volume. These keep Eastlake readable and are the copies that do the most good donated rather than sold.

Where Eastlake turns up — and how NMLP handles him

Eastlake is a northern New Mexico author, and his books cluster where his life did: estates in and around Cuba, the Jemez, and the Four Corners; the libraries of literary and academic readers across the Albuquerque–Santa Fe corridor; and the shelves of collectors who found him through the experimental-fiction revival the Dalkey Archive led. Because he is a name most generalist buyers and chain thrifts do not recognize, his firsts are precisely the kind of overlooked value that gets bagged for the dumpster in a hurried cleanout.

When Eastlake material comes through a New Mexico Literacy Project pickup, the handling is the same as for every collectible author: jacketed trilogy firsts and signed or association copies are identified by hand and routed to specialist literary dealers rather than buried in a bulk lot; later firsts go through careful resale; and the reprints and reading copies go to readers across New Mexico. Nothing readable is landfilled. If you are clearing a northern New Mexico library and an odd literary novel with a Navajo title makes you pause, that pause is worth a text to me.

External References

• Wikipedia: William Eastlake — life, the Cuba ranch, and bibliography.
• Papers of William Eastlake, University of Arizona Libraries, Special Collections.
• A Conversation with William Eastlake, Dalkey Archive Press.
• The 20th Century’s Greatest Hits: 100 English-Language Books of Fiction (Larry McCaffery) — the Checkerboard Trilogy listing.

Related on This Site

• Edward Abbey — a guest at Eastlake’s Cuba ranch and a fellow Southwest iconoclast.
• Frank Waters — the other great mystic novelist of New Mexico’s Native ground.
• New Mexico Native American Literature — the Navajo and Pueblo canon Eastlake wrote alongside.
• Conrad Richter and Eugene Manlove Rhodes — the New Mexico novelists Eastlake’s strange books answer.
• The New Mexico Literary Atlas — where Eastlake’s Cuba sits in the state’s literary geography.