Richard Bradford published the evocative Red Sky at Morning in 1968. In it, the fictitious town of Sagrado subs for Santa Fe, depicted as a western hamlet that holds on to safety during World War II. “Sagrado protected itself, as it had for more than 300 years, by being nonessential. That’s the best way to get through a war: don’t be big and strong, be hard to find,” was Bradford’s viewpoint. Harper Lee called the book “a minor marvel,” and it was adapted into a film.

His 1960 novel The Rounders and 1962 book The Hi-Lo Country ( both made into movies) established Max Evans as a New Mexico cowboy writer, exceptionally well versed in the ins and outs of wranglin’ horses, patchin’ fences and how “a running walk will carry a cowboy a lot of miles

in a day.” The end of the ranching business was a familiar theme for him.

In 1969 renowned Kiowa poet and author N. Scott Momaday became the first Native American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with his novel House Made of Dawn, about a young man returning from war and coming to terms with the hardship of life at his Jemez Pueblo home. In 2007, Momaday received the National Medal of Arts for his celebration and preservation of Native American oral tradition. Often contemplating nature, Momaday’s rich, melodic voice recites his own poetry in the documentary Return to RainyMountain: “I am the rolling thunder and the bursts/Of torrents upon rock.”