author
Thomas Watkins
A lively historian of the American West, he wrote with the eye of an editor and the curiosity of a storyteller. His books explored big moments in U.S. history, from the Great Depression to the people and landscapes that shaped the West.
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About the author
Known professionally as T. H. Watkins, Thomas Henry Watkins was an American author, magazine editor, and historian whose work focused especially on the American West and environmental history. He was born in California in 1936 and built a writing career that stretched from the 1960s into the 1990s.
Alongside his books, he edited and wrote for magazines including The American West, American Heritage, and Wilderness. His writing was widely respected for making history readable and vivid, and he also taught as the Wallace Stegner Distinguished Professor of Western American Studies at Montana State University.
He is especially remembered for Righteous Pilgrim, his biography of Harold L. Ickes, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography and was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Across his career, he returned again and again to the people, politics, and landscapes that helped define the American experience.