Charles Bowden was an American non-fiction author, journalist and essayist based in Las Cruces, New Mexico. His journalism appeared regularly in Harper’s GQ, and other national publications. He was the author of several books of nonfiction, including Down by the River. In more than a dozen groundbreaking books and many articles, Charles Bowden blazed a trail of fire from the deserts of the Southwest to the centers of power where abstract ideas of human nature hold sway—and to the roiling places that give such ideas the lie. He claimed as his turf "our soul history, the germinal material, vast and brooding, that is always left out of more orthodox (all of them) books about America" (Jim Harrison, on Blood Orchid ).
Books
Jericho
2020
Juarez
The Laboratory of Our Future
1998
Blue Desert
1986
The Secret Forest
1993
A Shadow in the City
Confessions of an Undercover Drug Warrior
2005
Blues for Cannibals
The Notes from Underground
2002
Murder City
Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields
2010
Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction
Work from 1970 to the Present
2007
Killing the Hidden Waters
1978
The Sonoran Desert
1992
The Charles Bowden Reader
2010
Dakotah
The Return of the Future
2019
Down by the River
Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family
2002
Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing
Living in the Future
2009
Blood Orchid
An Unnatural History of America
1995
Red Line
1989
The Red Caddy
Into the Unknown with Edward Abbey
2018
Frog Mountain Blues
1987
Stone Canyons of the Colorado Plateau
1996
Desierto
Memories of the Future
1991
Eugene Richards
2001
