Skip to main content

Ron Hansen

Biography

Ron Hansen

Ron Hansen is the author of 10 novels --- including MARIETTE IN ECSTASY, DESPERADOES and A WILD SURGE OF GUILTY PASSION --- and two short story collections, among them SHE LOVES ME NOT. His novel THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He graduated from Creighton University in Omaha and went on to the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop where he studied with John Irving. He is now Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J., Professor in Arts and Humanities at Santa Clara University in northern California.

Ron Hansen

Books by Ron Hansen

by Ron Hansen - Fiction, Historical Fiction, Western

Born Henry McCarty, Billy the Kid was a diminutive, charming, blond-haired young man who, growing up in New York, Kansas and later New Mexico, demonstrated a precocious dexterity at firing six-shooters with either hand --- a skill that both got him into and out of trouble and that turned him into an American legend of the old West. He was smart, well-spoken, attractive to both white and Mexican women, a good dancer, and a man with a nose for money, horses and trouble. His spree of crimes and murders has been immortalized in dime westerns, novels and movies. In THE KID, Ron Hansen breathes life into history, bringing readers back into Billy’s boyhood as a ranch hand just trying to wrest a fortune from an unforgiving landscape.