Silver Light

From 1865 to 1950, the multi-faceted world of the American West, its rich, colorful characters, and its many faces - historical, mythic, and cinematic - are captured in the story of a reclusive, elderly photographer and her friend, a writer of Western comic books

Set in 1950, the novel tells the tale of two 'relics' of the old West: Susan Garth, a reclusive octogenarian photographer, and her friend Bark Blaylock, an equally reclusive 75-year-old writer of Western comic books. Their life stories tell the tale of the West, a place of 'silver, space, the epitome of liberty.'

Susan and Bark cross paths with the characters of movies such as Wagonmaster, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. They had also been witness to the slaying of Billy the Kid, the cattle drive along the Chisholm Trail and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

Combining history, fiction, and the fabricated realities of film, Thomson examines the mythic image of the West and its meaning for Americans.

English-American writer David Thomson was educated at Dulwich College and the London School of Film Technique. After seven years at Penguin, he became a Director of Film Studies at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire between 1977 and 1981. Perhaps best known for his magisterial Biographical Dictionary of Film, Thomson is a prolific writer on film including biographies of David O Selznick and Orson Welles, and two books on Hollywood: Beneath Mulholland: Thoughts on Hollywood and Its Ghosts and The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood. Thomson lives in San Francisco with his wife and two sons.