A 1955 Walt Disney movie about Davy Crockett fired the imagination of a German orphan growing up in Cheyenne, sparking a lifelong fascination with the American West. Eventually that love, born in Wyoming, would carry Paul Andrew Hutton to the New York Times bestseller list — and now to one of Western literature’s highest honors, the Owen Wister Award.
Named for Owen Wister, author of “The Virginian,” widely considered the father of the modern American Western novel, the award is given by the Western Writers of America for lifetime achievement.
Winning the award puts Hutton in the company of Wyoming writers such as Craig Johnson, who won the award last year, and the Cody-based writing duo W. Michael Gear and Kathleen O’Neal, who won it in 2021.
Hutton now lives in Cody, which he told Cowboy State Daily is his favorite American town, first and foremost because it’s the hometown of a Western figure he admires, Buffalo Bill Cody.
Pioneer Melting Pot
Cody is one of seven out-sized figures whose biographies became the foundation for Hutton’s latest book, the New York Times bestseller “The Undiscovered Country: Triumph, Tragedy, and the Shaping of the American West”, released in August 2025.
The others are Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Red Eagle, Mangas Coloradas, Kit Carson and Sitting Bull.
“I feel biography is a great way to approach history,” Hutton said. “The travails of humans in their lifetime I think appeals to a broad audience. When you learn that, gee, Kit Carson had a lot of the same problems I had, it really makes them living and breathing.
“And that’s what I wanted to do in the book. I wanted to show Americans how our country was shaped by the Western movement. How it shaped our character, how it shaped our outlook, how it gave us an exceptional character as a people.”
America’s great diversity, Hutton added, came from so many different people, with so many different agendas, pursuing their dreams all in one vast place.
“And really it was encapsulated in popular culture by Buffalo Bill, who showed Americans, no matter where they came from, that we had this shared identity,” he said. “So that a kid like me, who comes over from Germany and falls in love with the West, and falls in love with cowboys, and who found my identity as an American — that’s been the immigrant experience in this country. It doesn’t matter if you come from Bulgaria, Germany, China or Africa, you can find your American identity out of the story of the American West.”
Falling For Cody Town
Hutton first discovered the town of Cody six decades ago just after graduating from high school. He and two buddies had set out in a Volkswagen bus to discover America.
Hutton had a different idea about what that meant than his friends.
For them, it was all about going to Las Vegas while listening to Simon & Garfunkel tunes.
Hutton was excited about Vegas, but he also made his friends stop along the way in the Black Hills and at the Little Bighorn Battlefield, as well as a little museum he’d heard about in Cody, the Buffalo Bill Historical Center.
“It had just moved out of the log cabin into the new digs we have here now,” Hutton recalled. “And in those days, there was no Plains Indian Museum. There was no Draper, no gun museum. But it just blew us away. Certainly, it blew me away. It was such a fabulous facility.”
While Hutton was visiting the museum, he couldn’t help but notice Cody’s charm. It might have been a little touristy around the edges, but there was an authenticity that immediately appealed.
Over the years, Hutton found excuses to return to Cody as often as possible.
“There’s just something about it that has always drawn me,” he said. “Cody has retained its sort of westernness and its appreciation of Western history as a town, as a community. A lot of that, of course, is owed to Buffalo Bill, who founded the town and did so much to bring people here.”
Getting to come back to Cody and serve as the Hal and Naoma Tate Endowed Chair of Western History and Curator for the Buffalo Bill Museum, which is now part of the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, has been “cosmic and gratifying,” Hutton said.
“There’s hardly a better place to be from than Cody, Wyoming,” he said. “That sounds like you’re a real Western writer if you’re from Cody.”
Bestseller Against All Odds
Getting a history book on the New York Times bestseller list was a pleasant shock for both Hutton and his publisher, Dutton Publishing.
“It’s very difficult to do with any kind of serious nonfiction,” Hutton said. “It’s mostly self-help books, cooking books, movie star memoirs and that sort of thing.”
Hutton said he believes part of the book’s success lies in how he strove to capture that first, epic feel the Davy Crockett movie of his youth gave him. Here were larger-than-life pioneers, cast as heroes. But, in addition, Hutton wove in some of the great contradictions of an early America headed West.
“We built something great that the world stands in awe of,” he said.
But it came at a cost.
“It was a terrible price in terms of trampling the rights of others, the natives who were here first and, of course, environmental degradation on a huge scale,” he added. “Which we’ve been trying to make right ever since.”
Hutton’s sensitive treatment of this material has garnered rave reviews, including from the Wall Street Journal’s Peter Cozzens, who praised the book’s immersive narrative style, blended with solid historical research.
“There is nothing didactic about ‘The Undiscovered Country',” Cozzens wrote. “The narrative never wavers. The author’s use of the lives of seminal figures to anchor the narrative draws the reader more deeply into the story than would a more conventional approach. It is an experiment in writing history that succeeds admirably.”
“Undiscovered Country” earned Top Ten Book of the Year from the Journal. It also won Best Historical Non-Fiction Book honors from True West Magazine and Hutton received the Western Writers of the America Spur Award for Historical Nonfiction.
"With ‘The Undiscovered Country,’ Mr. Hutton has produced the definitive popular history of the American West,” Cozzens concluded.
After that review, Hutton’s book sold out in 10 days.
“So, I kind of lost some momentum there for a while,” he said. “But once it was back in print, it continued to sell very well.”
Not Done Yet
While the Owen Wister Award is a lifetime achievement award, which to Hutton signals the “final glide path” of a career, the author said he’s far from done.
He’s already working on what he hopes will be his next New York Times bestselling history novel, this time about Buffalo Bill Cody.
“There have been a lot of books on Buffalo Bill, but surprisingly only two modern biographies,” Hutton said. “Louis Warren from 20 years ago, which was very good, but very academic, and then Don Russell from 1960, which is also a good biography, but very dated.”
Hutton plans to adopt the same treatment for his Buffalo Bill Cody book as he did for “Undiscovered Country.”
“It’s going to be solid history, but the emphasis is going to be on telling a good story,” he said. “Of course, when you have Buffalo Bill, one of the world’s great storytellers, as your subject, you’ve got fabulous material.”
And being an author who is sitting on what is essentially the “mother lode” of Buffalo Bill material, Hutton said he feels uniquely advantaged for his next piece.
“There are collections in Laramie and Denver and actually at Yale that I will need to consult,” he said. “But it will be a great book, because I have so much to work from, just right here in Cody.”
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
