The books in this section focus on the literary and performance precursors to the Western as a genre of filmmaking.
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Selling the Wild West
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The Western Pulp Hero
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Buffalo Bill's Story
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The Pulp Western
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Western Series
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Christine Bold. Selling the Wild West: Popular Western Fiction, 1860 to 1960. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987.
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Nick Carr. The Western Pulp Hero: An Investigation into the Psyche of an American Legend. San Bernardino, CA: The Borgo Press, 1989.
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Buffalo Bill Cody. Buffalo Bill's Story of the Wild West. New York: Fall River Press, 2013. Originally published by Historical Publishing Company in 1888 as Story of the Wild West and Campfire Chats.
From Amazon: Buffalo Bill Cody was a legend in his own time: pony express rider, friend of gunslinger Wild Bill Hickock, and impresario of the Wild West Show, the entertainment extravaganza that toured stagecoach holdups, blazing gunfights, and other Wild West thrills around the world. |
John A Dinan. The Pulp Western: A Popular History of the Western Fiction Magazine in America. San Bernardino, CA: The Borgo Press, 1983.
From Amazon: "The Pulp Western is a seminal work in the field, filled with fascinating information about the magazines, their contents, their editors and the most popular writers and characters." - J. Randolph Cox for Dime Novel Round-Up |
Bernard A. Drew with Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh. Western Series and Sequels, Second Edition. New York, London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1993.
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Ernest Haycox
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Filming the West
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Dime Novel Western
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Buffalo Bill's Wild West
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The Literate West
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Richard W. Etulain. Ernest Haycox and the Western. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017.
From Google Books: Western fans today may not recognize the name Ernest Haycox (1899–1950), but they know his work. John Ford turned one of his stories into the iconic film Stagecoach, and the whole Western literary genre still follows conventions that Haycox deftly mastered and reshaped. In this new book about Haycox’s literary career, Richard W. Etulain tells the engrossing story of his rise through the ranks of popular magazine and serial fiction to become one of the Western’s most successful creators. After graduating from the University of Oregon in 1923 with a degree in journalism, Haycox began his quest to break into New York’s pulp magazine scene, submitting dozens of stories before he began to make a living from his writing. By the end of the 1920s he had become a top writer for Western Story, Short Stories, and Adventure, among other popular weeklies and monthlies. Ernest Haycox and the Western traces Haycox’s path from rank beginner, to crack pulp writer, to regular contributor to Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post. Etulain shows how Haycox experimented with techniques to deepen and broaden his Westerns, creating more introspective protagonists (Hamlet heroes), introducing new types of heroines (the brunette vixen, the blonde Puritan), and weaving greater historical realism into his plots. After reaching the height of success with his best-selling Custer novel, Bugles in the Afternoon (1944), Haycox moved away from the financially rewarding but artistically constricting Western formula—only to achieve his final coup with The Earthbreakers, a historical novel about the end of the Oregon Trail, published posthumously in 1952. Reconstructing the career of a popular literary giant, Ernest Haycox and the Western restores Haycox to his rightful place in the history of Western literature. |
Ed Hulse. Filming the West of Zane Grey. CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2016.
From Amazon: Best-selling author Zane Grey wrote nearly 60 novels set in the American West, and a substantial number of them were adapted for the silver screen—some of them up to five times. With a total estimated audience of 250 million people, the former dentist and world-class fisherman entranced readers and viewers for decades with his highly romanticized tales of the frontier and the colorful pioneers who settled it. Some 111 feature-length films and two cliffhanger serials were adapted directly from Grey’s stories, and Filming the West of Zane Grey covers each one in detail. Casts, credits, plot synopses, contemporaneous reviews, release dates, running times, alternate titles—just about everything you’d want or need to know about Zane Grey movies is here. And it’s all tied together with an extensive, analytical, bio-historical essay by film historian Ed Hulse. |
Daryl Jones. The Dime Novel Western. Bowling Green, OH: The Popular Press, Bowling Green State University, 1978.
From Amazon: Traces the development of the western dime novel form from its source in early nineteenth-century fiction through to its full manifestation in the late 1800s. Daryl Jones focuses on the development of character types (backwoodsman, plainsman, outlaw, and cowboy), the settings, the structures, and the plots of this form. |
Joy S. Kasson. Buffalo Bill's Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History. New York: Hill and Wang, 2000.
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Tara Penry. "The Literate West in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals." In Nicolas S. Witschi, ed. A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West, First Edition. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2011.
From Amazon: A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West presents a series of essays that explore the historic and contemporary cultural expressions rooted in America's western states. *Offers a comprehensive approach to the wide range of cultural expressions originating in the west *Focuses on the intersections, complexities, and challenges found within and between the different historical and cultural groups that define the west's various distinctive regions *Addresses traditionally familiar icons and ideas about the west (such as cowboys, wide-open spaces, and violence) and their intersections with urbanization and other regional complexities *Features essays written by many of the leading scholars in western American cultural studies |
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Buffalo Bill in Bologna
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Dime Novels
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Sensationalization of Violence
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Imagining the Frontier
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Robert W. Rydell and Rob Kroes. Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World, 1896-1922. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
From Amazon: When it comes to the production and distribution of mass culture, no country in modern times has come close to rivaling the success of America. From blue jeans in central Europe to Elvis Presley's face on a Republic of Chad postage stamp, the reach of American mass culture extends into every corner of the globe. Most believe this is a twentieth-century phenomenon, but here Robert W. Rydell and Rob Kroes prove that its roots are far deeper. Buffalo Bill in Bologna reveals that the process of globalizing American mass culture began as early as the mid-nineteenth century. In fact, by the end of World War I, the United States already boasted an advanced network of culture industries that served to promote American values. Rydell and Kroes narrate how the circuses, amusement parks, vaudeville, mail-order catalogs, dime novels, and movies developed after the Civil War—tools central to hastening the reconstruction of the country—actually doubled as agents of American cultural diplomacy abroad. As symbols of America's version of the "good life," cultural products became a primary means for people around the world, especially in Europe, to reimagine both America and themselves in the context of America's growing global sphere of influence. Paying special attention to the role of the world's fairs, the exporting of Buffalo Bill's Wild West show to Europe, the release of The Birth of a Nation, and Woodrow Wilson's creation of the Committee on Public Information, Rydell and Kroes offer an absorbing tour through America's cultural expansion at the turn of the century. Buffalo Bill in Bologna is thus a tour de force that recasts what has been popularly understood about this period of American and global history. |
Shelley Streeby. "Dime novels and the rise of mass-market genres." In Leonardo Cassuto, Clare Virginia Eby, and Benjamin Reiss, eds. The Cambridge History of the American Novel. Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
From Cambridge University Press: This chapter traces a pre-history of the dime novel in the popular sentimental and sensational literature of the late 1840s and 1850s. It presents the proliferation of the dime novels introduced by Beadle and Company in the 1860s and 1870s. In 1860, Erastus and Irwin Beadle issued the very first dime novel, Ann Stephens's Malaeska; The Indian Wife of the White Hunter. Mary Andrews Denison's dime novels remind people of women's significant participation in the new culture industry and of the permeability of the boundary between sensational literature and the culture of sentiment in the early period of dime novel production. Many female authors of Beadle's dime Westerns focused on white settlers like Ann Stephens's Esther: A Story of the Oregon Trail. Finally, the chapter examines the dime novel's twilight era around the turn of the century, when it both competed with and inspired early cinema, comics, and pulp magazines. |
"Dime Novels and the Sensationalization of Frontier Violence." In Gregg Lee Carter, ed., Guns in American Society: A-L (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2002), 161-163.
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Stephanie Le Menager. "Imagining the Frontier." In Leonard Cassuto, Clare Virginia Eby, and Benjamin Reiss, eds., The Cambridge History of the American Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 515-536.
Abstract from Cambridge University Press: In the collective imaginings of the United States, the frontier has also functioned to separate the USA from global imperial history, marking it as an exceptional national experiment. The frontier problem that Wallace Stegner identified as that of establishing a continuing human pattern in a country that changes as fast as the West has been solved by exceptionalist thinking. American exceptionalism showed itself more readily in the upstartcity of Chicago, a former frontier trading post that within half a century had become the nation's railroad hub. It could be argued that the frontier was born on the back of industrial popular culture, as the arts began to sift into high and low forms and toward distinct classes of audience in the later decades of the nineteenth century. The frontier enacts a grand obsession, a drama by and about US settlement culture and its coming to power in North America. |