formulas; and the 'literary Western novels,' those that go beyond popular formulas, have offered readers a distinctive ontology and point of view, particularly since the 1930s. Although this chapter begins with the novel of the frontier and traces the history of both popular and literary Westerns through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, its main focus is on the literary Western from 1955 to 1990. During the last thirty-five years, most Western novelists have articulated in their art the conviction that we must stop exploiting not only other human beings but also the natural world that sustains all life.
The novel of the West developed from narratives of exploration and settlement and from the novel of the frontier, a subgenre initiated by Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland (1798) and made internationally famous by James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking tales (1823-41). Among other early frontier novelists, James Kirke Paulding wrote The Dutchman's Fireside (1831) about upper New York during the French and Indian Wars; Timothy Flint, author of The Shoshonee Valley (1830), depicted a Far West he had never seen; and Robert Montgomery Bird created a fictional Indian-hater in Nick of the Woods; or, The Jibbenainosay (1837). -437-
Frontier novels sometimes include such detailed descriptions of the landscape that the land assumes an importance as great as the characters, who are drawn from the European and Native American cultures that clashed on the frontier. Since such violent clashes generally attended the process of settlement, the novel of the frontier offered tales filled with action and adventure. Women played limited roles in these tales, but their gentle presence drove farther west frontiersmen such as Cooper's Natty Bumppo, a white who had been raised by Native Americans and who thereafter tried to live by the best of his 'red gifts' and 'white gifts.' Most frontier novels and many novels of the West exhibit these features developed by Cooper and his contemporaries: (1) an emphasis on the land; (2) action and adventure; (3) cultural clashes; (4) a hero who champions good, fights evil, and deplores the passing of the wilderness; and (5) a world either without women or with women in only minor roles.
In 1860, a little less than a decade after Cooper's death, the House of Beadle and Adams published the first dime novel, Malaeska: The Indian Wife of the White Hunter, by Ann S. Stephens. A flood of pulp fiction soon followed, and for the next seventy years, dime novels (most of them Westerns) reached an audience of millions and portrayed the famous types of the westward expansion: the plainsman, the outlaw, and the cowboy. Even more adventure-packed than the frontier novels of Cooper, dime novels glorified the exploits of frontier heroes such as Daniel Boone and Kit Carson and reduced the elements of frontier narrative to a simple formula. Prentiss Ingraham, Edward L. Wheeler, E. Z. C. Judson (pen name 'Ned Buntline'), and other dime novelists also wrote works that created popular heroes such as Buffalo Bill Cody.
While dime novelists busily created the West that won the popular imagination, other post-Civil War authors recorded a different sort of West in novels of local color, realism, and naturalism. Bret Harte, Mary Hallock Foote, E. W. Howe, and Helen Hunt Jackson gained a national audience with novels that looked at the West not only as a wild frontier but also as a place of settlement. Yet in spite of Foote's honesty, Howe's pioneering psychological portraits, and Jackson's feminism and defense of Native Americans, The Led-Horse Claim (1883), The Story of a Country Town (1883), and Ramona (1884) seem freighted with much Victorian melodrama and exhibit many of -438- the flaws of apprentice efforts. Less melodramatic and more polished are Frank Norris's McTeague (1899), and The Octopus (1901); Jack London's The Sea-Wolf (1904) and Martin Eden (1909); and Andy Adams's The Log of a Cowboy (1903). Although no school of Western fiction yet existed, and Wallace Stegner may be right in saying that no such school has ever existed, writers such as London and Adams probably shared Norris's view that 'the Westerner thinks along different lines from the Easterner and arrives at different conclusions. What is true of California is false of New York.'
Despite the truth of Norris's observation, it was an Easterner who wrote what came to be regarded as the model for the novel of the West. Owen Wister's The Virginian (1902) 'presents Wyoming between 1874 and 1890' and laments the passing of that 'vanished world,' brought to an end by the closing of the frontier with the last of the free land. Although Wister extols the cowboy as 'a hero without wings' and 'the last romantic figure upon our soil,' The Virginian subtly promotes elitism. The Virginian is no common cowboy; he is, rather, one of nature's aristocracy, a born leader that Wister portrays as having the right to circumvent the law in order to obtain justice. Wister's novel enjoyed considerable popularity, but not so much because of its elitism as because the Virginian courageously fights the evil Trampas and because the Virginian's marriage to Molly Wood, a transplanted New England schoolmarm, symbolized national reconciliation and union. What works against Wister's better purposes is his effectism — that is, the attempt to awaken vivid and violent emotions in the reader without respect for the truth. As Edwin H. Cady has written, The Virginian and its progeny teach 'the fatally false lesson that violence does not really matter; that it has no real consequences because the good guy is invulnerable and the bad guy is 'a creature.' In the 'effectist' world, violence is not real.'
Among the many writers whose works follow the pattern of The Virginian, Zane Grey became the most famous. In dozens of Grey's novels, the good guy invariably defeats the bad guy, simultaneously saving the beautiful heroine and winning her hand. Dozens of Grey's imitators, some more prolific than Grey, copied his formula and flooded pulp and slick magazines and paperback racks with adventurous tales of the Old West, some of them actually based upon real-life incidents. Generalizations about popular Westerns should be -439- suspect, partly because it is unlikely that any critic could read them all, but mainly because all sorts of popular writers have varied the pattern, and some have occasionally broken out of the formula. Consider the variety apparent in a random selection from the hundreds of novels by some of the most popular Western writers: Will Henry's From Where the Sun Now Stands (1960) recounts the history of the Nez Percé War from the Native Americans' point of view; Louis L'Amour sometimes gives mini lectures on events such as Custer's Last Stand; Matt Braun's Mattie Silks (1971) depicts a notorious Denver whore; Max Brand shows sympathy for Mexican peons in his Montana Kid series (1933-36); and Luke Short's Rimrock (1955) is set during the uranium boom in Colorado and Utah.
Moreover, many popular authors let their publishers market their novels as Westerns, although their works have been shaped less by the formula than by the results of historical research. Judy Alter's Mattie (1988) is full of authentic details about the life of a woman doctor. The real-life experience of Cynthia Ann Parker, captured by Comanches in 1836, forms the basis of Benjamin Capps's novel A Woman of the People (1966). Max Evans's The Rounders (1960) takes a typical Western subject, a New Mexican cowboy, but creates a tragicomedy from his experiences. Of her several dozen Western novels, Jeanne Williams says: 'I like to take little known events and dramatize them so that readers will get a picture of the many influences that shaped the West…and [of] man's responsibilities to other creatures and the earth that supports us all.' Like many popular Western writers, Williams visits the places she writes about and then conducts research in libraries with information about Western life and lore.
Library shelves constitute the only West that some popular Western writers ever see, for since the nineteenth century, Westerns have been written in such faraway lands as Germany, England, Norway, Italy, Turkey, Japan, and Czechoslovakia. Since the 1960s, many popular Western writers, including some in foreign countries, have doubled their novels' effectism by adding gratuitous sex to the formula of violence. Moreover, the violence and sex often seem twice as stimulating — and appalling — when conveyed by other media. Even before Edwin S. Porter's one-reeler movie The Great Train Robbery (1903), movies capitalized on the Westerns' popularity, and Holly-440- Holly- has continued to milk profit from the genre. Radio Westerns filled the airwaves during the 1930s and 1940s; and since the 1950s, television series such as 'Gunsmoke,' 'Wagon Train,' 'Bonanza,' and 'The Young Riders' have brought 'the West that wasn't' to millions of living rooms.
The widespread and long-lasting influence of the popular Western has overshadowed the artistic achievements of those who have written about the West that was and is. Although she was a Westerner and a contemporary of Zane Grey, Willa Cather avoided the formula of the popular Westerns. And although she wrote about the frontier West and its passing, she looked to the ancient classics and to the masterpieces of English and American literature for models and inspiration. Her subject matter, however, was usually Western.
In O Pioneers! (1913), Cather wrote: 'The great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes.' In
