The Outlaw Josey Wales

From Booklist Immediately familiar to many as the basis of one of Clint Eastwood’s most successful westerns, this reissue in Leisure’s Classic Film Collection was published as The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales in 1973. Set around the time of the Civil War, the novel tells the story of a Missouri farmer who, after his family is murdered by Union militia, joins up with a violent group of Confederate guerrilla fighters. After the war, the Union offers an amnesty to the guerrillas, but Wales refuses to sign. Now a wanted man, with a wounded boy to take care of (after a bungled bank robbery), Wales struggles to stay ahead of his pursuers as he leads them on a desperate chase across two states. The author, whose real name was Asa Earl Carter, was the center of some controversy when it was revealed that his 1976 memoir, The Education of Little Tree, was almost entirely fictional. Leaving allegations about his personal life and beliefs aside, this is a first-rate western, a dramatic character study of a man whose anger and hatred threaten to destroy him. --David Pitt