Why Annie Proulx writes the American West better than almost anyone

I've written a lot about the American west and some of the epic books that it has given us from Lonesome Dove to Blood Meridian. 

Traditionally, when you mention the American West it's easy to picture the familiar mythology: cowboys riding beneath endless skies, frontier grit, freedom waiting just beyond the horizon. It is a landscape that has been romanticised for generations, transformed into a symbol as much as a place.

Then you read Annie Proulx. and the West is something altogether different. It is beautiful, but it is also unforgiving. The wind strips the land bare. Winter is not picturesque but dangerous. Distance isolates as much as it liberates. People are shaped by the country they inhabit, often in ways they barely understand themselves.