Robert Morgan’s engrossing saga of the Westward Expansion, Lions of the West, is now available at your local bookstore. (Excerpt below.) Grab a copy today, pour yourself a mug of tea, and watch American history come to life in Morgan’s skilled hands. Morgan is the author of the national bestsellers Gap Creek, an Oprah Book Club selection, and Boone: A Biography, selected as one of the best books of the year by the Washington Post. Now he’s back to chronicle our rich and complicated history of expansion, from Thomas Jefferson’s birth in 1743 to the California Gold rush in 1849.

Jefferson, a naturalist and visionary, dreamed that the United States would stretch across the continent from ocean to ocean. Morgan charts how that dream became a reality through the stories of Jefferson and nine other Americans whose adventurous spirits and lust for land pushed the westward boundaries: Andrew Jackson, John “Johnny Appleseed” Chapman, David Crockett, Sam Houston, James K. Polk, Winfield Scott, Kit Carson, Nicholas Trist, and John Quincy Adams. Their tenacity was matched only by that of their enemies—the Mexican army under Santa Anna at the Alamo, the Comanche and Apache Indians, and the forbidding geography itself.

Known also for his powerful fiction (Gap Creek, The Truest Pleasure, Brave Enemies), Morgan uses his skill at characterization to give life to the personalities of these ten Americans without whom the United States might well have ended at the Arkansas border. Their stories—and those of the nameless thousands who risked their lives to settle on the frontier, displacing thousands of Native Americans—form an extraordinary chapter in American history that led directly to the cataclysm of the Civil War.

With illustrations, portraits, maps, battle plans, appendixes, notes, and time lines, Lions of the West is a richly authoritative biography of America as compelling as a grand novel.

Praise for Lions of the West:

“History as it should be told: through colorful biographical sketches, Morgan presents the unvarnished story of the annexation and settling of the American West.”—Shelf Awareness

“Robert Morgan should be declared a national treasure, and his latest work, Lions of the West, is bound to become a classic in the study of American westward expansion.” – Charlotte Observer

“A vivid, well-conceived look at western expansion in the old narrative-driven school of Bernard DeVoto and Wallace Stegner.” – Kirkus Reviews

“Fourscore years come alive through biographical vignettes that pull no punches…Nation-building accrued human costs as well as remarkable heroes—all revealed with Morgan’s customary grace and flair.”—Michael Kammen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Mystic Chords of Memory

“What a marvelou take on Thomas Jefferson’s westward expansion movement! In a sense Lions of the West is a sequel to Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage, about Lewis and Clark… Morgan proves once again to be an incredible prose stylist…Highly recommended.”—Douglas Brinkley, author of The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America

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