Certain historical aspects of the fictional betrayal of the
West may be found in E. Douglas Branch's _The Cowboy and His
Interpreters_, in _The House of Beadle and Adams and Its Dime
and Nickel Novels_, by Albert Johannsen in two magnificent
volumes, and in Jay Monaghan's _The Great Rascal: The Life and
Adventures of Ned Buntline_ Buntline having been perhaps the
most prolific of all Wild West fictionists.
Some "Westerns" have a kind of validity. If a serious reader
went through the hundreds of titles produced by William McLeod
Raine, Dane Coolidge, Eugene Cunningham,. B. M. Bower, the
late Ernest Haycox, and other manufacturers of range novels
who have known their West at firsthand, he would find,
spottedly, a surprising amount of truth about land and men, a
fluency in genuine cowboy lingo, and a respect for the code of
conduct. Yet even these novels have added to the difficulty
that serious writing in the Western field has in getting a
hearing on literary, rather than merely Western, grounds. Any
writer of Westerns must, like all
other creators, be judged on his own intellectual development.
"The Western and Ernest Haycox," by James Fargo, in _Prairie
Schooner_, XXVI (Summer, 1952) has something on this subject.
Pages:
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274