By Paul Horgan

Paul Horgan was very much a man of the American Southwest, living there most of his career and setting many of his works there. In those Southwestern spaces, he wrote, “great as they are, a person stands in relief like an earth feature, small, perhaps, but strongly lighted and as strongly shadowed.” Horgan was also very much a Catholic, and he saw and wrote about life according to the light which his religion granted him. These two powers of region and religion bear fruit in his Mountain Standard Time trilogy: Main Line West, Far From Cibola, and The Common Heart. Set in the Southwest, that land “alight with the quality of legend, made of hard mountains and cruel distances,” each novel tells its own story, yet characters and episodes all share in the grandeur, humility, and uncanny influence typical of Horgan’s rare talent. 

He stared at the golden-blue sky and what he felt was thanksgiving not that he was alive but that he had dared to die. 

The third in the MST set, The Common Heart is a hymn to man’s place on earth. For Peter Rush, that place is New Mexico—the land he loves. Around Rush, Horgan weaves the stories of other people, their hopes and memories, to craft a narrative that glimmers and glows with the desert’s warmth and the creator’s spirit. First published in 1942, The Common Heart still rings pure and clear, a story asking those questions of eternity which can be answered, not in words, but only in the heart.

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: 380pp.

ISBN: 978-1685954161