The Frontiersmen
Published 1981 · 626 pages · 172,150 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · History, Nonfiction
How hard is The Frontiersmen to read?
The Frontiersmen scores 22 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 33 out of 100
- A popular narrative history that readers compare to a novel, so the prose is plain and clear. It sits near the accessible contemporary end, well below literary fiction such as The Great Gatsby.
- Sentence structure: 35 out of 100
- Narrative history written for a general readership suggests direct, readable sentences. It is closer to the straightforward prose of 1984 than to anything dense.
- Abstraction: 30 out of 100
- Frontier history is built from events, people and places rather than theory. Readers describe it as story-like, which keeps the content concrete.
- Information density: 50 out of 100
- At 751 pages and about 172,000 words it carries a lot of historical detail across many events. The narrative style keeps the pace manageable, closer to Atomic Habits than to encyclopedic works.
How The Frontiersmen is regarded
The Frontiersmen holds a literary regard score of 26 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.