The Mythic West in Twentieth-Century America

Winner: Caroline Bancroft Prize

Winner: Western Heritage Book Award

Just what and where is the West? Why have so many been so obsessed with finding and saving that mythic time and place? What has the West meant to those who have lived there and to the millions more who have journeyed there only in their imaginations? And how have the answers to these questions changed with the years? The issues involved here—the place of the West and the frontier experience in our search for a national identi...