Books by Blake Allmendinger

Geographic Personas explores how writers, dancers, actors, imposters, and con artists were influenced by three transformative factors-population growth, technology, and literary realism-that contributed to their personal reinvention during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the American West.

In this psychologically gripping memoir, Blake Allmendinger returns to his childhood home after a forty-year absence. His homecoming to the struggling farming community of Rocky Ford, Colorado, formerly known as the Melon Capital of the World, forces the author to confront his own sad and disturbing history, one that parallels his hometown's decline.

A study of African American literature on the early frontier and in the modern urban American West. It charts the terrain of African American literature in the West through an exploration of novels, histories, autobiographies, science fiction, mysteries, formula westerns, melodramas, experimental theater, political essay, and rap music and film.