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Gary McCarthy is an American novelist of westerns and historical fiction. A Cal Poly Animal Science graduate and former economist for the State of Nevada, he published his first novel, The Derby Man, with Doubleday in 1976. He has since written six Derby Man novels, six Rivers West novels, five National Park historical novels, and The Horsemen series, among many other westerns. He has won two Western Writers of America Spur Awards and, in 2019, received the Western Fictioneers Lifetime Achievement Peacemaker Award.
He traded a steady government job for a stack of rejection slips and an unlikely hero in a derby hat. Five decades later, the two-time Spur Award winner is still riding the long trail, now to the rim of the Grand Canyon.
By DORX Chronicle Staff · October 6, 2026
