The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones

“Charles Neider, you know, spent two and a half years in New Mexico to get the true story of Billy the Kid. And finally he gave it up, went to Monterey and in six weeks wrote what he called The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones. It’s a great book. It should be read.”

—Sam Peckinpah

“Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and films like Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch and Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven might never have been made without Charles Neider’s unfairly obscure novel The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones … [Neider’s] prose, like Twain’s, takes great joy in the American vernacular. The laconic conversations of his hardened criminals will appeal to fans of Elmore Leonard … As in Charles Portis’s True Grit, Neider’s narrator is alternately comic and chilling in his matter-of-factness … The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones is neither a kind nor a comforting book, but it is a good one, wry, caustic and wise about the young, doomed American male.”

—Matthew Keeley, The Washington Post

“When Neider’s unsentimental, elegiac tale of a legendary gunslinger’s final days came out in 1956, the then-ubiquitous Western genre was ripe for demythologizing, or for what Will Oldham describes in his excellent foreword as ‘masculinity and violence approached with subtlety and gentility’ … Neider’s timeless novel sneaks up on readers with a kind of elliptical genius that simultaneously celebrates and subverts its mythos, anticipating and surpassing many of the revisionist Westerns that were to follow.”

—David Wright, Library Journal, Starred Review

“Neider’s book is better than any other book on the subject of men, horses, and death, except Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry. Not a far-fetched comparison when you consider that Neider—though American-raised—was Odessa-born.”

—Clive Sinclair, The Independent

“Great Westerns are both mythic and defiantly down to earth, as is this powerful ballet of menace.”

—Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

“A tremendous book. It belongs to that massive reassessment you find in mid-century noir, intended for readers who … had been force-fed the same myths about who we are and what we were bound to become. Americans, in other words, bloodied victors, who were told they had to act like winners even though victory often doesn’t taste or feel like we think it’s going to. Neider begins to gently and gentlemanly pull apart ways of looking at our Western stories.”

—Will Oldham, from the Foreword

Charles Neider was born in Odessa, in what was then Russia, in 1915. His family emigrated to the United States when he was five years old, moving to Richmond, Virginia. In addition to being a novelist, Neider was an essayist, nature writer, and leading Mark Twain scholar. Over the course of his career, he published numerous books of fiction and nonfiction, edited collections of the work of Twain, Tolstoy, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Washington Irving, and made several trips to the Antarctic. He died in 2001.

Will Oldham has released more than twenty studio albums, along with EPs, singles, and music for film and television, performing, variously, as himself, Palace Brothers, or Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy. He is a longtime denizen of Louisville, Kentucky.