ARIZONA, USA — Arizona has a wealth of gorgeous scenery. And there are no shortage of books that have attempted to describe its variety and majesty. You could spend decades reading all of them. But what if your time and bookshelf are short? Here are some of the essential books about Arizona that every new and longtime resident should know about.
We've put Amazon links in here, but you can find many of these are your local bookstore...
Arizona: A History, by Thomas Sheridan. A comprehensive general history that covers just about every significant development and trend. Careful scholarship that also happens to be rendered in fine writing.
The Bean Trees, by Barbara Kingsolver. A picaresque ensemble novel set in 1980s Tucson detailing the struggles of a recent migrant from Kentucky to adopt a Native girl. But what she’s really writing about is the way that dispossessed people manage to find each other and care for one another in the jumbled urban Southwest.
Named in Stone and Sky: An Arizona Anthology, edited by Greg McNamee. A collection of classic writing about Arizona: pioneer journals, Ed Abbey’s crankiness, Native creation stories, dime Western prose, poetry, nature writing – it’s all here
A Pima Remembers, by George Webb. A beautiful and heartbreaking autobiography from one of the Native farmers with direct experience of the Gila River before big dams and corporate agriculture changed the landscape for the worse. This is like Arizona’s version of Things Fall Apart: a clash between traditional ways and modernity.
Laughing Boy, by Oliver LaFarge. The winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1927, this was one of the first American novels to depict the inner lives of Native characters, along with a practical view of their traditional spirituality. It’s a love story set on the Navajo Nation with a tragic ending. In a twist, the author’s son, Peter LaFarge, would go on to write several famous songs about Native Americans, including “The Ballad of Ira Hayes.”
Cadillac Desert, by Marc Reisner. While Arizona’s hydrology takes up only part of this magisterial history of water in the West, this is an indispensable volume for understanding the ways that federal policy reshaped the land and distorted the politics. In short, water flows uphill toward money.
Tertiary History of the Grand Caynon District, by Clarence Dutton. Read a government document for fun? This one is worth it. An 1882 report from the U.S. Geological Survey almost singlehandedly changed the nation’s view of Arizona’s signature chasm from a worthless gash into a magnificent gift. “Dimensions mean nothing to the senses,” Dutton wrote, "and all that we are conscious of in this respect is a troubled sense of immensity.”
Ocean Power: Poems of the Desert, by Ofelia Zepeda. Lyrics about the effect of desert light and air, centered on the Tohono O’odham Reservation to the west of Tucson. The scent of thunderstorms, mesquite and hot dry summers lays thick over Zepeda’s writing; an old man “dreams of women with harvesting sticks raised to the sky.”
The Trunk Murderess: Winnie Ruth Judd, by Jana Bommersbach. Phoenix still had its dusty cowtown identity when a 26-year-old nurse went on trial for hacking her girlfriends to death and stuffing the parts into a steamer trunk she carried with her on a train to Los Angeles. Bommersbach, a crack Valley journalist, got Judd to talk in her elderly years about the sensational crime and the result is a gripping read about Southwestern mores and manners at the end of the Flapper Era.
Midnight on the Desert, by J.B. Priestley. The English playwright Priestly spent a winter at the Remuda Ranch outside Wickenburg and produced this extraordinary narrative about geology, time, America, darkness and wonder. He was an outsider who could see things that locals could not, and his observations still hold water almost a century later.
The Short, Swift Time of Gods on Earth: The Hohokam Chronicles, edited by Donald Bahr. When it comes to an indispensable Arizona story (and metaphor, and cautionary tale), it is difficult to top the rise and sudden 13th century disappearance of the civilization that built the first canals in the Salt River Valley. In 1935, two anthropologists took down the entire creation story of their descendants, the Akimel O’odham, to provide an insight on this foundational culture that mastered desert hydrology.
— Tom Zoellner is the author of nine nonfiction books, including Rim to River: Looking Into the Heart of Arizona.
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