First published in 1977, Robert Days The Last Cattle Drive—an instant bestseller and Book-of-the-Month Club selection—is now a modern-day Western classic. This raucous, rollicking novel of a cattle drive in the age of the automobile revived a genre and added its own special twists in capturing the imagination of readers nationwide. To honor the thirtieth anniversary of its publication, the University Press of Kansas is proud to announce a new 30th anniversary edition of this much-loved work.

This edition includes these new features: a foreword by acclaimed Western historian Howard R. Lamar, reflecting on the novels enduring popularity; an afterword by Robert Day recalling the experience of writing the novel and commenting on his own literary heroes (among them Mark Twain); The Last Cattle Drive Stampede, Days hilarious piece about failed attempts to make a movie of the book; and special endpaper maps of the cattle-drive route. Whether youre renewing your affection for an old favorite or coming to the work for the first time, this new edition will be a book to treasure and return to time and time again.

“Spangler Star Tukle is a Kansas cattleman with 6,000 acres and a low boiling point. (Tukle is so choleric that he empties a shotgun into a power mower that has offended him.) When the rancher decides to drive his 250 head of cattle to the Kansas City stockyards to save shipping costs, you can expect Murphy’s Law to become 100 percent operative. . . . Atmospheric.”

—New York Times Book Review

“Tightly written . . . and powerfully evocative. The smells, sights, and sounds of Kansas are described so well at times that one begins to cough as the dust crawls up through the floorboards of the battered pickup.”

—Baltimore Sun

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“Very real, earthy, and vital. Exceedingly well told and funny.”

—Kansas City Star

“I [feel] honored and privileged to have the opportunity to express my enduring admiration for Robert Day and his delightfully readable, humorous, and plain-spoken novel, [which] I have been re-reading over and over for nearly three decades. . . . Day’s lively portrait of his beloved home state of Kansas, often saddled by stereotypical images of being sternly Protestant, conservative, and teetotalling, instead becomes an example of a vibrant, varied society of free-wheeling individuals, rural and city men and women, who enjoy their tomato beer and whiskey and have strong opinions about what is wrong with the U.S. government and incorrect television and film versions of Kansas and the West.”

—Howard Lamar

“Bob Day’s novel is like the man himself—ebullient, precise, Rabelaisian, witty. Its written in remarkably fine North American English. It wears its cowboy boots, as does the author himself, very comfortably and with a highly polished panache.”

—Anthony Burgess

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