In the late 1960s, while heading up the Western operations for Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Alan Kishbaugh met the distinguished writer Frank Waters in Taos, New Mexico. From 1968 until Waters’s death almost thirty years later, the two wrote each other hundreds of letters. This annotated collection of their correspondence reveals Waters’s profound engagement with the land and cultures of the Southwest.

A lively introduction to the breadth of Waters’s work, Deep Waters touches on themes of ecology, philosophy, pre-Columbiana, Eastern philosophy, Egyptology, American Indians, and a host of other subjects reflecting the great cultural shifts occurring at the time. Kishbaugh and Waters write of the women in their lives, mutual friends, writing and publishing challenges, and newly discovered books. Their letters offer new views of the legendary writers’ colonies of Santa Fe and Taos and the arrival of the counterculture in New Mexico.