Cowboy and His Friend was published by Harcourt, Brace & World in 1961. The book follows a small boy through a day of imaginative play: he is a cowboy, his teddy bear is his trusty companion, and together they ride the range, rope cattle, and make camp under the stars — all within the confines of a backyard and a bedroom.
Anglund’s treatment of imaginative play is characteristically observant: she shows how children shift fluidly between reality and fantasy, how ordinary objects (a stick, a chair, a blanket) become the props of an interior drama as real as anything in the external world. The teddy bear is simultaneously a stuffed toy and a living companion — and the book takes both perspectives seriously without irony.
The Western setting was timely: 1961 was the peak of the television Western’s dominance of American popular culture, and cowboy play was the default imaginative mode for American boys. But Anglund’s cowboy is not violent — there are no gunfights, no Indians to chase, no bad men to capture. Her West is about open space, companionship, and the self-sufficiency of the imagination.
The book functions, like much of Anglund’s work, as both a children’s story and an adult meditation on childhood: parents reading it to their children are simultaneously observing their own nostalgia for the creative freedom of early imaginative life.
Collecting Cowboy and His Friend
First edition (Harcourt, Brace & World, New York, 1961): Small hardcover, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $20–$50
- Very good/very good: $8–$20