He has been called “one of the greatest chroniclers of the mythical American outlaw life”[1] and as “one of the most original writers in America today and … certainly one of the bravest.”[2] He was a recipient of the University of South Florida's Distinguished Humanities Alumnus Award and a member of the Texas Institute of Letters.
Blake wrote about his boyhood in a memoir essay entitled “The Outsider” and has discussed his life and work in a profile in Texas Monthly and in a wide-ranging interview in Firsts.
[3][4] Although Blake wrote sporadically from his teens until his thirties, it was not until the early 1980s, while again living in Miami, that he began to write with purpose,[5] and over the next few years he published a number of short stories in a variety of literary journals.
Despite its “western” setting, it was recognized as a significant literary work presenting not only the story of the title character, but also, through its vast array of narrators, a cultural mosaic of the South in the era of Reconstruction.
In addition to Wes Hardin, his novels have centered on Pancho Villa, the Mexican bandit and revolutionary (The Friends of Pancho Villa); John Ashley of the notorious Ashley criminal gang in early twentieth-century Florida (Red Grass River); “Bloody Bill” Anderson, the Missouri guerrilla captain of the American Civil War (Wildwood Boys); Harry Pierpont, the 1930s gangster and leader of a band of bank robbers that included John Dillinger (Handsome Harry); and Stanley Ketchel, the ragtime-era boxing champion who was murdered at age twenty-four (The Killings of Stanley Ketchel).
Even in those of his novels whose protagonists are created of whole cloth (In the Rogue Blood, A World of Thieves, Under the Skin, Country of the Bad Wolfes), real-life people play significant or cameo roles.