Award-winning author Tony Hillerman, who passed away Oct. 26, 2008. Photo courtesy HarperCollins.

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Tony Hillerman’s Latest Literary Honor
Is the prestigious Owen Wister Award
His knowledge of the Navajos is no mystery

Few writers have matched Tony Hillerman’s success. Most celebrated for his contemporary mystery novels featuring Navajo tribal policemen Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, Hillerman’s accolades are as numerous as his appearances on best-seller lists. Mystery Writers of America has honored him with the Edgar award for Best Mystery Novel for Dance Hall of the Dead (1974) and its Grand Master Award. Western Writers of America has presented him with Spur Awards for Best Western Novel for Skinwalkers (1986) and The Shape Shifter (2006).

On June 14, during the closing banquet of the Western Writers of America Convention in Scottsdale, Ariz., Hillerman will be honored with the Owen Wister Award (previously known as the Levi Strauss Saddleman Award) for lifetime contribution to the literature of the American West, joining a who’s who of literary icons such as David Dary, Max Evans, Will Henry, Elmer Kelton, Dorothy M. Johnson, Robert M. Utley and John Jakes.

After graduating from the University of Oklahoma, which he attended on the GI Bill after World War II, Hillerman got his start as a journalist in Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico. He wrote nonfiction essays—many of which appear in his book The Great Taos Bank Robbery and Other Indian Country Affairs—while teaching journalism and serving as what he calls President Tom Popejoy’s “handyman and doer of undignified deeds” at the University of New Mexico.

Despite turning 83 in May, Hillerrman finds it hard to walk away from writing. He took a break from writing an essay and planning another novel at his Albuquerque, N.M., home to talk about the Owen Wister Award, his interest in writing and sharing a few war stories (he was a decorated U.S. Army soldier in World War II).

What are you reading now?
The Worst Hard Time [by Timothy Egan] and, boy, does that bring back all sorts of memories. I remember looking out the kitchen window across a cotton yard in Sacred Heart, Okla., to see if my dad was coming home. The cotton yard was maybe 60 yards wide, and it was noon and the dust was so thick you couldn’t see across the cotton yard. We were poor. Of course, nobody knew they were poor. I had no idea. Everybody was poor. We weren’t any poorer than anybody else.

What did you read as a boy?
Everything I could get my hands on.… We had the state library. If you wrote them a letter, they would send you a list of books and then you’d send them a list of what you wanted to check out and money to cover the postage. I’d be asking for War and Peace, or cowboys and Indians, combat, war stuff, aviation. I still remember opening the first package and pulling out History of the Masonic Order in the West. Then there was Recovery of the Cotton Industry in South Carolina. Stuff like that. But I read them.

What made you want to write?
Well, I always enjoyed reading.… I got in the Army, got in a rifle company…well, everybody in my company decided when the war was over we were going to circulate a petition, ask Congress to abolish West Point, tear down all the West Point buildings, salt the ground so it wouldn’t spring back up and then get Congress to enact a Constitutional amendment banning people who could not pass a fourth-grade intelligence test from gaining a commission in the United States Army.

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