Far From Cibola

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.  The second in the MST set, Far From Cibola captures episodes of ordinary human life in a small New Mexico city amidst the desperate times of the Great Depression, each episode giving expression in some way to the pity and urgency of universal human needs and desires. First published in 1938, Far From Cibola draws its enduring freshness and power from its unstated central subject: human charity—“the greatest of these.” He was walking toward a sky that was like sunrise and sunset. It was warmth to wrap himself in. 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. * * * Paperback: 146pp. ISBN: 978-1685954154