Rick Bass, a Mississippi-born writer now living in Montana's remote Yaak Valley, writes stories about the landscapes and people of Montana. Bass's books include In the Loyal Mountains: Stories (1995) and The Roadless Yaak: Reflections and Observations about One of Our Last Great Wilderness Areas (2002).

Hugo was friends with Raymond Carver, another great writer from the American West. (Both were born in the Pacific Northwest.) Carver's 1983 collection of short stories, Cathedral, a classic work of contemporary fiction, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize.

For students interested in the development of Hugo's poetry, his posthumously published Making Certain It Goes On: The Collected Poems of Richard Hugo (1983), is indispensable.

Hugo's 1979 collection of essays on writing, The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing, has become a classic text for...