A graduate of North Texas State University, Jim Hitt along with his wife Vicki have lived at Four Seasons since 2006. In addition to numerous magazine articles, he is also the author of The American West: From Fiction Into Film (McFarland, 1991), which has been called the definitive monograph on the subject. Words and Shadows (Citadel, 1992), a large format book, examined the connection between mainstream American literature and film.  He is also included in The Louis L’Amour Companion. 

Carny A Novel in Stories follows a circus as it travels the back roads of Southern California in 1948. It won the 2011 Grand Prize for Fiction from Next Generation Indie Book Awards. These are stories of carny people and their world that, taken together, form a novel with a distinct beginning and end.”

 His next book was The Courage of Others (Open Books, 2016), a novel set in Texas in 1919. The story is narrated by a teenage white boy who becomes embroiled in racial tensions of the period. One reviewer praised the book as “a cross between My Antonia and To Kill a Mockingbird.” 

 In August 2018 Jim’s latest novel, Bodie, was published by Black Horse Press, which the reviewer for Roundup, the official magazine of the Western Writers of America said was “the kind of Western that every traditionist novelist seeks to pen.” A prequel, Bodie A Western Part I, is also available as an e-book on Amazon. 

 His next novel, Storm Riders, will be released August 17, 2022, by Five Star.