Although Elmer Kelton was recently voted "Best Western Writer of All Time" by the Western Writers of America, this modest man would cast his vote for Eugene Manlove Rhodes, a New Mexico writer from the early '20s.

But Rhodes didn't win the Western Writers of America's Spur Award six times, or four Western Heritage Awards from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame—Kelton did though.

With a background in agricultural journalism—writing for the San Angelo Standard-Times for 40 years and as associate editor of Livestock Weekly for 20 years— Kelton has worked closely with the land and the people that he writes about. His longtime hobby of fiction writing came to the forefront when he retired in 1992.

His novels focus on Texas, like his latest, "The Buckskin Line," which traces the Texas Rangers' humble beginnings as a group of local riders, buckskin clad and badgeless, formed to protect the settlers against Indian raids.

What sets Kelton's writing apart is his emphasis on strong characterization. You don't find the typical shoot-'em-up sheriffs and fainting heroines in Kelton's books. You don't have what he calls, "stories of the utility West," where every character was a simple variation on a theme, every story having been told before.

These formulaic action Westerns were popularized by writers like Ned Buntline who told the adventures of Buffalo Bill in early dime novels, or "penny dreadfuls," as Kelton calls them. While these short stories, often published in pulp magazines and read by young boys, were essential to the birth of the genre, they leave much to be desired in terms of literary value.

"The Western isn't respected among polite literary circles," Kelton points out, largely because of the stigma created by these early no-frills action stories. Granted, the pulp magazines are where most, including Kelton, got their start, writing short stories and novelettes as a training ground for the novel. Kelton's first story, "There's Always Another Chance," was published in 1947 in a magazine called Ranch Romances.

But he finds it harder and harder to get critics, and even editors, to read a Western these days. "The genre as a whole has faced a shrinking market," Kelton laments. "To kids just starting in school, World War II is as far back in time as the Civil War was for me when I started writing." With the onset of a new millennium, the appeal of the past seems to be fading.

Can the ideals of the Western survive in this new age? "I've heard many people say that 'Star Wars' was the best Western they'd ever seen," Kelton says. Of course there's the pioneering aspects of science fiction and space as a new frontier, but detailed scientific language leaves the West behind. Part of the Western's charm is its nostalgia for a simpler time.

While most of his works center on the time before and after the Civil War, his novel "The Good Old Boys," finds a mid-life cowboy facing the age of the automobile, a sad reminder that the glory days have passed. (A fan of Westerns, Tommy Lee Jones picked up this story and starred and directed in a feature-length TV-made adaptation.) Kelton's favorite among his own collection, "The Time That Never Rained," has a slightly more contemporary setting, as an elderly rancher in the 1950s is faced with the problems of a long Texas drought.

But a new setting isn't what's necessarily needed to revive the genre. Sure, the same story framed as science fiction will get a lot more attention, but it would no longer be a Western, Kelton believes. While he does a tremendous amount of historical research on events in Texas' past, his characters are largely fictional. Striving to break the molds cast by dime novels, he seeks out characters that have a vulnerability about them, invoking a strong sense of feeling in the reader that you don't get from a larger-than-life John Wayne cowboy, because you know he's going to win in the end.

In "The Buckskin Line," a young red-haired boy is orphaned when a band of Indians kills his mother and father. This story could have gone the "Little Big Man" route—a white boy raised by Indians. But his captive is killed and the boy is adopted by a Mexican War veteran who rides with the embryonic Texas Rangers. Caught in the middle of the Civil War, the boy, dubbed Rusty by his foster father, is torn between two loyalties as he grows and eventually joins the Rangers. "Texas was considerably conflicted over the Civil War," Kelton explains, much like the country was over Vietnam.

For some, these wars were about race, as were the battles the Rangers fought against the Indians. In "Buckskin," Buffalo Caller, the Indian who kills Rusty's parents, dies in the end—a stroke of vengeance? When asked about his treatment of Native Americans, Kelton replied, "They were human beings with faults as well as good sides." He says he always tries to show both views of a conflict in his stories to avoid the white-hat-black-hat dichotomy ever present in tales of the West. Still, the fact that he speaks of Indians in past tense shows the impact white settlers had on their population. But Kelton's main characters aren't always white settlers either; two of his stories have black leads, one tells of a Mexican cowboy and Buffalo Caller's son who will live on in the sequel to "Buckskin."

"It's actually a very varied genre," Kelton says. His advice for writers attempting a Western: "Forget about trying to classify it as a Western or whatever else. Just write a darn good novel. And you don't have to apologize for it being a Western. If it's a good novel, it's a good novel." —Liz Cordingley