A Bullet for Billy the Kid

Novelist Henry Wilson Allen wrote more than 50 novels under the pseudonyms of Will Henry and Clay Fisher. He held a variety of jobs before becoming an author including a gold miner, blacksmith, house mover, sugar mill worker, and newspaper columnist. He called himself "a man born into the wrong century," and his work shows his fascination with the history and people of the nineteenth-century American West.

Whether he is writing about Jesse James as a psychotic gunman in Death of a Legend (1954), Native Americans in From Where the Sun Now Stands (1960), or the explorers Lewis and Clark in Gates of the Mountains (1963), his careful historical research is evident. He often uses such devices as the alleged discovery of old diaries or family papers to make the reader think that the book is history rather than fiction, as in No Survivors (1950). His books are solidly crafted and always of high quality.

He died of pneumonia in 1991 at the age of 79.

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