John Willingham's new novel, The Last Woman, will be released by TCU Press on August 15, 2025. He is also the author of the 2023 essay "Should We Forget the Alamo?: Myths, Slavery, and the Texas Revolution," published by Southwestern Historical Quarterly and cited by the Houston Chronicle and other publications.
"TCU Press publishes original, regional literary fiction...[and] has traditionally published the history and literature of Texas and the American West. As the press has grown steadily in stature and in its ability to bring credit to its parent university over the last sixty years, it has been praised for publishing regional fiction and for discovering and preserving local history."
The Last Woman: Inspired by true events, The Last Woman is the story of three young women whose lives become intertwined as they flee up the Mississippi River in 1877. Within a year, two of them take off for Dodge City, reluctantly leaving their friend behind in St. Louis. Six decades later, the most adventurous soul among them, forsaking her given name of Catherine, has become the last woman in Tascosa, Texas—once the wildest cowtown in the West.
We meet her when she's eighty years old, re-living and reflecting on her past, the fate of her friends, and the perils of other women for whom escape to the West was an act born of desperation. She has been living under an alias since 1878, hoping that no one else will track her down.
"TCU Press publishes original, regional literary fiction...[and] has traditionally published the history and literature of Texas and the American West. As the press has grown steadily in stature and in its ability to bring credit to its parent university over the last sixty years, it has been praised for publishing regional fiction and for discovering and preserving local history."
The Last Woman: Inspired by true events, The Last Woman is the story of three young women whose lives become intertwined as they flee up the Mississippi River in 1877. Within a year, two of them take off for Dodge City, reluctantly leaving their friend behind in St. Louis. Six decades later, the most adventurous soul among them, forsaking her given name of Catherine, has become the last woman in Tascosa, Texas—once the wildest cowtown in the West.
We meet her when she's eighty years old, re-living and reflecting on her past, the fate of her friends, and the perils of other women for whom escape to the West was an act born of desperation. She has been living under an alias since 1878, hoping that no one else will track her down.
There wasn’t one plot of ground in the whole town that she did not know, with or without the houses, businesses, and saloons that originally occupied the space; not one person who had lived in the town for any time at all had she forgotten, though she knew many of them only by the made-up names they’d used to scatter dust across their trails; and not many screams in the night, shouts of joy, songs sweet or bawdy, or gunshots fired to kill a man or graze the stars could she not recall, at least in her restless dreams.
Here is more Information about John' s op-eds, books, and essays.