Sunday, April 20, 2014

How the West Was Written: Frontier Fiction, 1880-1906 by Ron Scheer

This book began as a question about the origins of the cowboy western ... how it grew from Owen Wister’s bestseller, The Virginian (1902), to Zane Grey’s first novels a decade later. A reading of frontier fiction from that period, however, soon reveals that the cowboy western was only one of many different kinds of stories being set in the West.

Besides novels about ranching and the cattle industry, writers wrote stories about railroads, mining, timber, the military, politics, women’s rights, temperance, law enforcement, engineering projects, homesteaders, detectives, preachers and, of course, Indians, all of it an outpouring between the years 1880–1915. That brief 35-year period extends from the Earp-Clanton gunfight in Tombstone, Arizona, to the start of the First World War.

The chapters of How the West Was Written tell a story of how the western frontier fed the imagination of writers, both men and women. It illustrates how the cowboy is only one small figure in a much larger fictional landscape. There are early frontier novels in which he is the central character, while in others he’s only a two-dimensional, tobacco-chewing caricature, or just an incidental part of the scenery.

A reading of this body of work reveals that the best-remembered novel from that period, The Virginian, is only one among many early western stories. And it was not the first. The western terrain was used to explore ideas already present in other popular fiction—ideas about character, women, romance, villainy, race, and so on. A modern reader of early western fiction discovers that Wister’s novel was part of a flood of creative output. He and, later, Zane Grey were just two of many writers using the frontier as a setting for telling the human story.  Ron Scheer
 
Currently available in ebook format for Kindle and in paperback. A second volume is in the works for the years 1907 - 1915.

9 comments:

Charles Gramlich said...

Wonderful! I will plan to get the print edition. I think it'll be nice to have on my shelves. Glad this is available

David Cranmer said...

It looks like the print version will be ready very shortly, Charles.

David Cranmer said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Prashant C. Trikannad said...

David, I just bought this and I'm looking forward to reading it, especially since westerns, books and films, are my first love. I knew Ron was working on it but I didn't know the ebook was out. And now I have Vol.II to look forward too as well. Thanks, David.

David Cranmer said...

Prashant, Ron has been working on this for several years and I was delighted when he approached me about publishing it through BEAT to a PULP. As I said elsewhere, its been a real pleasure working with him and his talented better half on How the West Was Written.

Prashant C. Trikannad said...

David, I didn't know Ron's book was published through BEAT TO A PULP. I enjoy reading his reviews of western books and films.

David Cranmer said...

Ron Scheer is the premier reviewer of Western literature and I'm happy to say another volume is in the works.

pattinase (abbott) said...

Oh, this looks wonderful. Ron is a beautiful writer and he has been working on this for some time. I will post it too.

David Cranmer said...

Thank you, Patti!