7 summer reads that feature Colorado

There’s something about Colorado’s jaw-dropping landscapes and pioneer spirit that seems to attract great writers.

Just last month, Colorado selected two outstanding new books to represent its local literary heritage at this year’s National Book Festival. But look back further, and you’ll find this state has a treasure trove of literary classics waiting to be rediscovered.

RED invited Jason Miller, Ph.D., English professor at Metropolitan State University of Denver, to name some all-time great reads.

“The Shining” by Stephen King

No discussion of Colorado’s literary history should fail to mention former Boulder resident Stephen King, who has showcased the state in several novels. “Misery,” for example, utilized the harsh Rocky Mountain winters as a prime plot device, while “The Stand” featured a harrowing journey through the Eisenhower Tunnel. But “The Shining” is perhaps the writer’s greatest paean to his onetime home and might well be the most read novel set in the state.

The book’s spooky Overlook Hotel is based on the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, which inspired King, following an overnight stay, to write a haunting story set in a desolate location. And while most people are familiar with Stanley Kubrick’s movie adaptation (who could forget Jack Nicholson and his ax?), it’s worth noting that the book is very different and well worth a read.

“Centennial” by James Michener

Written by onetime Greeley resident James Michener, “Centennial” is a sprawling, multigenerational novel that expertly captures the spirit of early settlers on the South Platte. Across hundreds of beautifully written pages, it presents a compelling vision of Colorado, from prehistory through the early 1970s.

The book not only tells the story of how the land and the humans who came to inhabit it shaped each other; it also outlines the broader Western project that has been so significant to American identity. It could be argued that the popularity of the novel and the subsequent adapted miniseries, much of which was filmed in Colorado, has helped solidify the importance of our state in the history of the nation.

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“Angle of Repose” by Wallace Stegner

This is a mesmerising novel with a fascinating origin story. In 1876, adventurous young New York heiress Mary Hallock Foote married a fortune-hunting mining engineer and headed west, only to then face a lifetime of hardship in inhospitable towns, including the silver-boom city of Leadville.

A century later, novelist Wallace Stegner got permission from Foote’s family to use her life story (and letters home) as the foundation for this historical saga, which many consider his magnum opus. While the novel presents an absorbing fictional narrative, it is Foote’s letters — many published verbatim — that form the emotional backbone of the story and provide illuminating insight into what it meant to be a woman and an artist in the blossoming West. Her collected letters were later published under the heading “A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West.”

“The Song of the Lark” by Willa Cather

Willa Cather’s third novel, in many respects a self-portrait, is an exploration of the artistic instinct borne out on a rough-hewn landscape: the plains of 1890s Colorado. Set initially in the fictional mountain town of Moonstone, the book follows the fortunes of a gifted singer, Thea Kronborg, who gradually outgrows her roots on the western American Plains and begins to realize her artistic potential.

But as Thea’s talents move her farther and farther east, to ever more acclaim, what gradually becomes clear to her is a lesson many of those raised in Colorado have learned: The state you leave might never leave you. This powerful story was the second novel in Cather’s acclaimed Great Plains Trilogy.

“Sometimes a Great Notion” by Ken Kesey

Following the dazzling success of his debut novel, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Kesey’s sophomore effort was this captivating and expansive doorstop of a book. Primarily set in a fictionalized logging town in Oregon during the 1960s, it features the obstinate Stamper clan, which causes chaos by bucking a bitter townwide strike while fighting and betraying one another.

But the novel also lingers awhile in Rocky Ford, where the post-World War II population is shown gradually gearing up for rapid social change. What’s more, the town’s famous tradition of Watermelon Day, established in 1878 when a local farmer shared his crop with passengers on a passing train, is given center stage. In Kesey’s hands, the occasion acts as a cultural crossroads at which traditional and emerging values clash in this foundational American story.

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“On the Road” by Jack Kerouac

Kerouac’s highly autobiographical novel, a defining work of the Beat movement, follows main characters Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty (based on Kerouac and his literary soulmate, Neal Cassady) as they travel tirelessly up, down and across the whole country.

Unsurprisingly, their crisscrossing road trips take them through Colorado several times and some notable developments occur in the state. During the book’s second visit to Denver, for example, we see the beginning of a rift between the protagonists — a breach that will define the rest of the novel.

The book also reveals Kerouac’s adoration for Denver as a city where perspectives meet and mingle to shape something new. This sentiment is perhaps best captured when Paradise describes walking along “with the most wicked grin of joy in the world, among the bums and beat cowboys of Larimer Street.”

“Smart Women” by Judy Blume

While many of us grew up on the children’s books of Judy Blume, her adult novels aren’t nearly so well-known, but they deserve to be. “Smart Women” tells the affecting story of two recently divorced 30-something mothers, messily navigating the challenges of dating while managing fraught relationships with their daughters.

The Colorado connection comes from the book’s setting. Published in 1980, “Smart Women” is set in Boulder, a location that put the book in the vanguard of a pop-culture fascination with the college town that continues to this day. Overall, this feels like a Centennial State novel, given that the exploration of new beginnings is a common Colorado theme. If Blume’s two main characters want a fresh start in a land filled with opportunity, they have found the right place.