Progress report

Desert spring, clouds, March winds, and new leaves

About eight months ago I posted here a progress report on my early-western project. For well over two years now, I’ve been finding and reading first novels and story collections set in the West and published between 1880-1915. That project grew to be much larger than first expected. The dozen or so writers I started with gradually grew into a much longer list.

Last July, the list had grown to 100, and eventually topped off at 105. I am now down to the last 5-6 novels—and as many as ten if I include writers who are well known today: Willa Cather, Jack London, Frank Norris, and Helen Hunt Jackson. By contrast with mostly unknown books and writers, there is more than enough already written about these authors. But I’d welcome the opinion of readers here as to whether I should include them.

At any rate, the end is in sight.

Objective. My guiding objective has been to assemble an extensive study of the period’s popular fiction that will give a picture of how the West was imagined by turn-of-the-century writers and readers. I see the finished product as an informal guide to the period, not something stuffy and academic.

Besides the plot for each novel, I try to follow several threads that run through all of them. I’m interested in the portrayal of character, the role of women, romance, racial attitudes, language and style, the western setting, cowboys, mining, timber, railroads, the military, and regional differences, plus whatever biographical material I can find about the author.

Context. It’s an interesting period historically. The years follow closely on the heels of the Civil War, the gold rushes, the Indian Wars, and the “closing” of the frontier West. They embrace the Spanish-American War and the Progressivist era of Theodore Roosevelt, and they are fraught with social issues that eventually produced women’s suffrage and Prohibition.

As we look back to that time, Owen Wister and Zane Grey remain prominent for us today. But in reality Wister was only one among several successful western writers. And Zane Grey did not emerge until the end of the period.

There were scores of other writers who produced a substantial outpouring of fiction set in the West. Many of them, though forgotten, are still highly readable and entertaining. Still at the dawn of the coming age of both movies and pulp magazines, they wrote at a time when print was king. People read books, periodicals, and newspapers in great numbers.

Writers then as now wrote to capture the attention and recognition of this public and, if possible, to make a living. I want to capture some of how all that gave shape to what would eventually become “the western.”

Any thoughts from interested readers as I go into the final stages of writing are welcome.

Image credits:

Desert photo, Ron Scheer © 2013

Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: The Sundowners (1960)