Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film [Paperback]

A history of the Western in fiction and on film that shows how it reflects the changing obsessions and fears of American culture

Few genres are so closely identified with America as the Western. In this wide-ranging examination of the Western and its appeal, Lee Clark Mitchell ranges from the novels of James Fenimore Cooper to Louis L'Amour, and from classic films likeStagecoachto spaghetti Westerns likeA Fistful of Dollarto show how Westerns helped assuage a series of crises in American culture. This landmark book shows that the Western owes its perennial appeal not to unchanging conventions but to the deftness with which it responds to the obsessions and fears of its audience. And no obsession, Lee Mitchell argues, has figured more prominently in the Western than what it means to be a man. 

Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Popular Appeal
2. Still Landscapes and Moral Restraint
3. Falling Short
4. Sexual Equality
5. White Slaves in Purple Sage
6. A Man Being Beaten
7. Sentimental Educations
8. Violence Begets
9. Last Rites
Notes
Index

“Elegantly written. . . . Provocative . . . characterized by [Mitchell’s] own tendency to shoot from the hip.”

”[Mitchell’s] book would be worth reading just for the way he relates Benjamin Spock’sBaby and Childto the postwar Western."

”Integrating a careful handling of historical context with a keen eye for textual nuances, Mitchell reconstructs the Western’s aesthetic tradition of the 19th century.”