While supporting himself as an agricultural journalist -- he paid his bills covering news about heifer prices and the scourge of screwworms -- Mr. Kelton wrote more than 60 books. They included the novels "The Time It Never Rained" (1973), "The Wolf and the Buffalo" (1980) and "The Good Old Boys" (1978), the last of which became a movie on the TNT cable network directed by and starring Tommy Lee Jones in 1995.

That same year, the Western Writers of America named Mr. Kelton the best Western writer of all time. He had already won many top awards of the organization and the National Cowboy Hall of Fame.

As Mr. Kelton continued to produce best-selling westerns, critics and reviewers began to notice that he was driving the genre into unexplored territory. He learned to "use the western setting as a vehicle for studying mankind, rather than as an end in itself," in novels that "are characterized thematically by the moral complexities wrought in men's lives by change and stylistically by a narrative voice that speaks clearly of West Texas," wrote Judith Alter, editor of Texas Christian University Press.