Dan O'Brien
Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database. Dan O'Brien was born Daniel Hosler O'Brien in Findlay Ohio on November 23, 1947. He attended Findlay High School and graduated in 1966. He went to Michigan Technological University to play football and graduated with a BS degree in Math and Business from Findlay College in 1970 where he was the chairman of the first campus Earth Day. He earned an MA in English Literature from the University of South Dakota in 1973 where he studied under Frederick Manfred. He earned an MFA from Bowling Green University (of Ohio) in 1974, worked as a biologist and wrote for a few years before entering the PhD program at Denver University. When he won the prestigious Iowa Short Fiction in 1986 he gave up academics except for occasional short term teaching jobs. O'Brien continued to write and work as an endangered species biologist for the South Dakota Department of Game Fish and Parks and later the Peregrine Fund. In the late 1990s he began to change his small cattle ranch in South Dakota to a buffalo ranch. In 2001 he founded Wild Idea Buffalo Company and Sustainable Harvest Alliance to produce large landscape, grass fed and field harvest buffalo to supply high quality and sustainable buffalo meat to people interested in human health and the health of the American Great Plains. He now raises buffalo and lives on the Cheyenne River Ranch in western South Dakota with his wife Jill. Dan O'Brien is the winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award, two National Endowment for the Arts Grants for fiction, A Bush Foundation Award for writing, a Spur Award, two Wrangler Awards from the National cowboy Hall of Fame, and an honorary PhD from the University of South Dakota. His books have been translated into seven foreign languages and his essays, reviews, and short stories have been published in many periodicals including, Redbook, New York Times Magazine, FYI. New York Times Book Review.
12 Books Written
A story about his decision to devote himself to his greatest loves - falconry, his bird dogs, and the prairie he calls home.
For twenty years Dan O'Brien struggled to make ends meet on his cattle ranch in South Dakota. But when a neighbor invited him to lend a hand at the annual buffalo roundup, O'Brien was inspired to convert his own ranch, the Broken Heart, to buffalo. Starting with thirteen calves, "short-necked, golden balls of wool," O'Brien embarked on a journey that returned buffalo to his land for the first time
A healer with a conscience and a mission, Valentine McGillycuddy has lived among the Lakota Sioux -- mending their wounds, delivering their children -- and had once called the great warrior chief Crazy Horse "friend." Now, with his frail, beautiful wife by his side, the doctor is heading to Pine Ridge, the newly renamed reservation in the Dakota Territories, to act as the government's Indian agent
This beautifully written historical novel from one of the West's most popular writers tells the true story of the friendship between Valentine McGillicuddy, a young doctor plucked from his prestigious medical career and newly married wife to serve in the army during the Great Sioux War, and the great chief Crazy Horse. When Crazy Horse finally agrees to surrender to the United States, mistrust and
Still coping with the loss of his young wife years ago, passionless Bill Malone has to take on developers who want to build condominiums on his beloved South Dakota retreat, Brendan Prairie, and an investigation into the suspicious death of developer Andy Arnold.Once a great falconer and environmentalist, Malone has entered middle age a broken man, devoid of the passion and promise of
The author's account of a 2000-mile journey from the Canadian border to the Mexican Gulf, with a young peregrine falcon he rescued from the wild. His purpose was to teach her to survive on her own. It is the story of one man's personal quest, searching for a balance between the wild and domesticity. Dan O'Brien has also written a novel, "Spirit of the Hills" and a collection of short stories, "Emi
When a mining company discovers gold near the Badlands, South Dakota bank president Larry Sorenson moves to secure ownership of four cattle ranches that control access to the gold, beginning a feud between ranchers and developers
O'Brien evokes the mythic themes of the old and new West in a highly charged novel of murder and revenge set against the beautifully evocative, haunting landscape of the Black Hills of South Dakota.
Ten stories deal with a grieving son, a junkyard owner, fishermen, farmers, the rescue of a wounded mountain climber, and country life
Honor Book, 2011 Nebraska Book Awards, Fiction CategoryForeword Reviews , 2011 Book of the Year, Silver Award, General FictionMcDermot, Nebraska, is a pleasant, scenic western cattle town situated in the Pawnee River valley—just the place for people seeking refuge from their hectic city lives. It is also just the place for those who have made their homes on this haunting prairie
For more than forty years the prairies of South Dakota have been Dan O’Brien’s home. Working as a writer and an endangered-species biologist, he became convinced that returning grass-fed, free-roaming buffalo to the grasslands of the northern plains would return natural balance to the region and reestablish the undulating prairie lost through poor land management and overzealous farming. In 1998 h
A Project of the Center for Great Plains Studies and the School of Natural Resources, University of NebraskaGreat Plains Bison traces the history and ecology of this American symbol from the origins of the great herds that once dominated the prairie to its near extinction in the late nineteenth century and the subsequent efforts to restore the bison population. A longtime wildlife biol