Historical Dictionary of Westerns in Literature
By (author) Paul Varner
Publication date:
20 September 2010Length of book:
408 pagesPublisher
Scarecrow PressISBN-13: 9780810860926
When in 1902 Owen Wister, a member of the Eastern blueblood aristocracy and friend of novelist Henry James, became a best-selling novelist with the publication of The Virginian, few readers would have guessed that a new kind of American literature was being born. While Owen Wister was enjoying his success, Edwin S. Porter in New Jersey was filming the first cinema Western The Great Train Robbery, which would usher in a new era both of movies in general and of Western movies in particular. Both events would lead to a century of cultural fascination with stories of the old West.
The Historical Dictionary of Westerns in Literature tells the story of the Western through a chronology, a bibliography, an introductory essay, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on authors such as Owen Wister, Zane Grey, Max Brand, Clarence Mulford, Ernest Haycox, Luke Short, Dorothy Johnson, Louis L'Amour, and Cormac McCarthy.
The Historical Dictionary of Westerns in Literature tells the story of the Western through a chronology, a bibliography, an introductory essay, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on authors such as Owen Wister, Zane Grey, Max Brand, Clarence Mulford, Ernest Haycox, Luke Short, Dorothy Johnson, Louis L'Amour, and Cormac McCarthy.
Historical Dictionary of Westerns in Literature is an installment in Scarecrow's Historical Dictionaries of Language and the Arts series. Author Varner, professor of English at Abilene Christian University in Texas, has previously edited Westerns: Paperback Novels and Movies from Hollywood (Cambridge Scholars, 2007) and authored the Historical Dictionary of Westerns in Cinema (Scarecrow, 2008). Varner has followed the standard structure of the series and includes a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography in addition to the alphabetically arranged entries....As with other books in this series, the bibliography is a valuable resource for researchers, including as it does primary sources (the westerns), critical and theoretical approaches to westerns, historical studies of westerns, casebooks of criticism, and biographical and critical studies of individual authors. This work is recommended for academic and large public libraries.