If you’ve been around here long enough, then you know that Brian Sweany used to work at D Magazine. He left us in 2005 for Texas Monthly, and we’ve never forgiven him for it. So it gives me great pains to pass along the news that he’s got himself a book deal brokered by none other than local literary agent and noted scamp David Hale Smith. The full release
Texas Monthly deputy editor Brian Sweany’s The Kingdom of the Saddle, a biography of cowboy and businessman Charles Goodnight (Larry McMurtry’s model for Captain Woodrow Call in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Lonesome Dove), who blazed the Goodnight Loving Trail to lead one of the longest and most important cattle drives in US history and reshaped the American West while earning and losing vast fortunes several times over the course of his 93-year life, sold to editor Vanessa Kehren at Penguin’s Blue Rider Press, in a deal negotiated by David Hale Smith at Inkwell Management (North American publishing rights).