By Paul Horgan

New York State in the 1920s: a time of brisk and bright hope, with prosperity and progress rising as a vision beyond the fact of mortality to which all men are subject. For Richard, now in his sophomore year of college, life is a fruit ripe for the picking. But when his father, the newly elected Lieutenant Governor of New York, is taken ill with tuberculosis, Richard leaves college to join his family in New Mexico. There his own health weakens, and he is prescribed a course of “toughening up.” Taking his place as a ranch-hand at Don Elizario Wenzel’s sheep ranch, Richard faces not only the searing heat of the desert but also the beckoning mysteries of love in its myriad forms: the strong sureness of a father, the tender care of a mother, the warm delight of a spouse, the firm fastness of a friend. As Richard comes fully of age, his embrace of love must endure the corrosive force of love’s antithesis: the lust for power, domination, and intoxication that promises life but in the end only obtains its destruction.

“In every life, Richard, there is something, great or small, to be ashamed of,” said my father. “Just as there is something noble. Never fail to be ashamed of the first, and never take credit for the second.”

First published in 1977, The Thin Mountain Air concludes the trilogy of “Richard novels,” begun with Things As They Are (1964) and Everything to Live For (1968). Patiently and wisely rendering each of Richard’s adventures, Horgan both captures the sense of life in his story and preserves a chasteness at its heart—the fruit of a virtuous vision and strong moral imagination that tell truthfully of life as it is.

Paul Horgan (1903–1995) was an American Catholic historian and novelist, praised by David McCullough as “a writer of large vision and many-sidedness” with a match­less “command of language and feeling for human nature.” Author of forty-plus books, including seventeen novels, Horgan received two Pulitzer Prizes, as well as nineteen honorary degrees and the University of Notre Dame’s Laetare Medal.

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Paperback: 336pp.

ISBN: 978-1685954833