His articles and essays have appeared there and in a wide variety of other magazines, including Outside, Esquire, The New York Times Book Review, National Geographic, American History, The Wall Street Journal, and Slate.

A starred review in Publishers Weekly hailed the book as “superb”[2] and, in the judgment of Pulitzer Prize winning historian Joseph J. Ellis, it is “historical fiction at its very best.”[3] He has recently finished a sweeping history of Texas, from prehistory to the present, entitled "Big Wonderful Thing".

Stephen Harrigan has also been a prolific screenwriter, principally in the field of made-for-television movies, a career he recounted in a Slate essay titled "I Was an A-List Writer of B-List Productions.

"[4] Among the films he has written are The Last of His Tribe (HBO), Beyond the Prairie: The True Story of Laura Ingalls Wilder (CBS), King of Texas (TNT) and The Colt (The Hallmark Channel.)

He worked with Robert Altman on a feature version of S. R. Bindler's documentary, Hands on a Hard Body, about an endurance contest to win a pickup truck.