Originally published in 1948, one year after A. B. Guthrie’s The Big Sky, Lona Hanson establishes many of the themes of Thomas Savage’s later masterworks. In ranchwoman Lona Hanson, Savage creates an extraordinary character: passionate, driven, domineering, and ultimately tragic. As O. Alan Weltzien writes in his introduction to this new edition, “Savage’s resistance to, even revulsion from, hack Western plots in film or print stamped his own independence as he set about writing the Rocky Mountain West he knew first hand, from the inside.”

Alan Weltzien has received two Fulbright Fellowships and one University of Montana Faculty Exchange Award. Weltzien recently published his first book of poems, To Kilimanjaro and Back, and has edited, co-edited, or authored five other books, including a memoir entitled A Father and an Island: Reflections on Loss, and The Norman Maclean Reader, and an article titled "Thomas Savage: a Forgotten Novelist."