The King of Taos
Winner of the 2021 Western Heritage Award for Outstanding Western Novel
The underground world of con men, winos, prostitutes, laborers, and artists has been an abundant source of material for great writers from Dickens to Bukowski. The underground world of Taos, New Mexico, is no different. In the late 1950s this mountain town was higher, brighter, poorer, and farther removed than London, Paris, or Los Angeles, but it was every bit as rich for the explorations of a young writer. Max Evans, the beloved New Mexican writer of such enduring classics of Western fiction as The Rounders and The Hi-Lo Country, returns to form with The King of Taos. Set in the late 1950s, the novel tells the stories of sharp-witted Zacharias Chacon, aspiring artist Shaw Spencer, and a circle of characters who drink, fight, love, argue, and—mostly—talk. Readers will enjoy this witty and moving evocation of unforgettable characters as they look for work, love, comfort, dignity, and bottomless oblivion.
In my opinion, Evans was an author akin to James Joyce, John Steinbeck, and J. P. S. Brown.…I believe anyone who reads The King of Taos and savors Evans’s writing will not only be inspired, but have their own personal spiritual awakening through Max’s prose and the fictional-life experiences of his characters.
The book is about the camaraderie, the joy of life, the musings, and the misadventures and dreams of Zacharias and his Tokay-loving friends.
Max Evans is a legendary New Mexico author.…He moved to Taos with visions of becoming rich and famous. Now, sixty years later, Max would say he is neither, but his newest book is certainly rich.
Evans may have been born in Texas, but New Mexico—the setting of many of his twenty-five novels—captured his heart. His latest, written at ninety-five years old, is no exception. A series of sharp vignettes describe the meandering misfortunes of the drunken ne’er-do-wells who populate post-World War II Taos.
Evans draws on his years in 1950s Taos, New Mexico, for this wistful picaresque.…It’s a treat to watch Evans pull this off.
There’s plenty of barroom scumbaggery, booze-soaked bad decisions, and even well-rendered redemption to bridge us from one Northern New Mexico snapshot to the next as Evans’s rogue cast plumbs the depths, escapes the grave, disdains the tourista Texans (bravo!), and offers one another whatever mercy each of them can spare.
For anyone who loves Taos, The King of Taos is a fun romp back in time when the plaza was a central meeting place, the jail was a dungeon, and a quarter could buy you a beer. Maybe a simpler time, but from Evans’s perspective, definitely a wilder time.
In his novels and stories, the eminent Max Evans forgoes romantic visions of the mythic West to champion the common man of today, like a veritable John Steinbeck. But in his new novel, The King of Taos, he turns back the clock to a time when rabble-rousing artists and writers lived for the moment, decorum be damned. The novel…is a love letter to an era long gone—Taos in the late 1950s—and a paean to the people who lived there.
The landscape of Taos…is rendered with such beauty that it becomes a presence in its own right. The King of Taos is a nostalgic portrait of a time and place, packed with people whose mistakes and shifting ambitions make them memorable.
Max Evans is the author of over thirty works of fiction and nonfiction. He is the recipient of the Spur, Wrangler, and Owen Wister awards, and he is the subject of the biography Ol' Max Evans: The First Thousand Years and a documentary film of the same title. Evans has made his home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for over fifty years.
