author

Noel West

A little-known late 19th-century writer, this author is remembered today for frontier fiction that follows young readers into the hardships and hope of prairie life. The surviving record is slim, which gives the work an old-fashioned air of mystery as well as adventure.

1 Audiobook

Left on the Prairie

Left on the Prairie

by Noel West

About the author

Noel West is the pen name attached to Left on the Prairie, a novel first published in 1899. Library and ebook records connect Noel West with M. B. Cox, and Project Gutenberg lists West as an alias for that name.

Because so little biographical information appears in the readily available sources, it is safest to describe Noel West as a scarce and somewhat obscure author rather than fill in uncertain details. What can be said with confidence is that the work has stayed in circulation through public-domain and library catalogs, where it continues to be presented as a story of emigrant and prairie life for younger readers.

That small footprint can be part of the appeal. Readers coming to Noel West are discovering not a heavily documented literary celebrity, but a voice preserved mainly through the book itself.