Telling Western Stories: From Buffalo Bill to Larry McMurtry / Edition 1

by Richard W. Etulain

Overview

What has the western of literature and film contributed to American culture? Richard Etulain, the leading cultural historian of the West, answers that question by tracing four distinct storytelling traditions and exploring the indelible images each has left in the public's mind over the past 125 years. Our images of cowboys, lawmen, outlaws, and Indians come from a collage of sources, including Buffalo Bill, Frederick Jackson Turner, Calamity Jane, Mary Hallock Foote, Geronimo, Mourning Dove, Owen Wister, Zane Grey, Walter Noble Burns, John Ford, Louis L'Amour, Wallace Stegner, Patricia Nelson Limerick, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Larry McMurtry.

Etulain begins with the dominant image conveyed in Wild West shows and dime novels of the late nineteenth century—the West as a place of adventure and danger. In the early twentieth century stories by women and Indians appeared, but they were soon overlooked and not rediscovered until the 1970s. The period from the 1920s to the 1950s represents the classic era of western movies and novels—of cavalry charges to save the day and heroes in white hats. But since the 1960s a counter story has emerged, one of ambiguity and complexity that often turned upside down our notions about what really mattered in how we look at the West.

Etulain carefully explores why stories of the frontier and American West still rival those of the American Civil War as the country's most popular tales, and he shows how narratives that persisted relatively unchanged for a century have moved in notable new directions since the 1960s.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826321404
Publisher:	University of New Mexico Press
Publication date:	08/01/1999
Series:	Calvin P. Horn Lectures in Western History and Culture Series
Edition description:	1 ED
Pages:	190
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.44(d)

About the Author

Richard Etulain is professor emeritus of history at the University of New Mexico and the author or editor of more than forty books. Etulain lives in Clackamas, Oregon.

Editorial Reviews

a[Etulainas] prose is accessible and informative to general readers as well as scholars.a

aEtulain shows how a new story, 'gray, ' complex, and multiple in perspective, has supplanted the old story.a

[Etulains] prose is accessible and informative to general readers as well as scholars.

. . . "Telling Western Stories" deserves a wide audience. . . . Etulains short, clearly-written, readable volume would serve as a stimulant to discussion in any seminar on western cultural history.

ÝEtulains¨ prose is accessible and informative to general readers as well as scholars.

Etulain shows how a new story, 'gray, ' complex, and multiple in perspective, has supplanted the old story.

In "Telling Western Stories" Richard Etulain has produced one of those rare combinations of a book that would make an excellent text for any class in Western literature and at the same time a well-written history easily enjoyed simply as a book of general interest. . . . The book should be read and enjoyed by students and scholars, literary historians and lovers of the West, disciples of Frederick Jackson, and shameless fans of Louis LAmour alike.

"[Etulain's] prose is accessible and informative to general readers as well as scholars."

From the Publisher