2017 western recommendations from True West magazine

Western history and fiction publishers have had an outstanding year across all genres and categories. With the growth in electronic and audio books, as well as in self-publishing and Internet sales in new and used books, readers, collectors and listeners have more choices and more opportunity to read, learn and relax with a Western-genre book.

As we approach the end-of-the year holiday season, I offer our True West readers a review and sampling of Western books from the year that will satisfy the most particular interests as you consider gift-giving to loved ones—or even to yourself!

The American epic': Hollywood's enduring love for the western

“The movie has us re-examining the self-evident truths of America,” Thompson says, tackling subjects like poverty’s multi-generational stranglehold, the lingering impact of domestic violence; casual racism and even the pros and cons of a state loaded with guns. But it does so amid a landscape of bank robberies and getaway cars, stakeouts and shootouts.

The Rise of the New Western in the 1960s: E.L. Doctorow’s Welcome to Hard Times

On the New Western:

In these circumstances, the Western managed to survive by parodying its own formula restrictions and distorting the classic reader’s expectations of the genre. The Western also became part and parcel of the artistic innovations at hand as it was taken up even by traditionally non-Western writers such as Thomas Berger (Little Big Man, 1964), Ishmael Reed (Yellow Back Radio Broke Down, 1968) and E.L. Doctorow, to name a few. These authors turned to the most popular genre of the time with a double mission: to both deconstruct it, and to use it to revive the traditional novel-writing process through the use of Western elements. The traditional novel, like the Western, was commonly regarded to have exhausted itself.

2014 interview with Larry McMurtry

MJ: You felt that Lonesome Dove was misinterpreted, that you'd intended it as an anti-Western. In what sense?

LM: Would you like your menfolk to be that way? The Western myth is a heroic myth, and yet settling the West was not heroic. It ended with Custer; it was the end of the settlement narrative, which had been going on since 1620.

No more guns in the valley: Logan director James Mangold on Shane

In 2013 James Mangold introduced a screening of the Shane, a movie that was a big influence on Logan.

"The best Western films (and this is an example of the very best) are not centered on nostalgia, are not historical in nature (the moment in history when these films took place is largely a manufacture of imagination). The best of these films create a landscape that has evolved into an American mythology, one as resonant and evocative as Religious parables, Japanese Samurai tales and the Greek Gods of Olympus."

Larry McMurtry vs. Cormac McCarthy

"As codified by Texas literary giants like Walter Prescott Webb and T. R. Fehrenbach, our quasi-religious history has often resembled historical fiction—a triumphalist mythology that a generation of “revisionist” (i.e., factual) historians has largely failed to budge from our collective psyche. Instead, ironically, the task of debunking all those popular misconceptions has fallen to contemporary Western novelists. Historical revisionism, it seems, wears better in cowboy boots; over the past three decades, the nihilistic anti-heroism of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985) has evolved into Meyer’s more complex but no less morally desolate frontier, where everyone is either a victim or a thief. While the new offerings by Wittliff, McMurtry, and Guinn are considerably less apocalyptic in tone than McCarthy’s and Meyer’s books, they similarly challenge old-school readers with timely meditations on racism, sexism, and even economic inequality. "

Genre and the geographies of violence: Cormac McCarthy and the contemporary western.

Really interesting paper from Susan Kollin



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If we take seriously Robinson's observations about the self-subversion of traditional Westerns, the ways even classic Westerns contain elements that overturn their dominant themes, then the generic distinctions defining Western texts as traditional or revisionist ultimately fail us, as the concept of a purely faithful or fully critical text loses its explanatory power.(FN2) If classic Westerns contain moments of resistance and self-reflection, carrying with them their own critique, to what extent might anti-Westerns preserve moments of desire, moments of connection and identification with elements of the classic Western? Perhaps the genre might better be understood as a continuum, its critique operating along a spectrum. On the one end may be found the classic Western, which upholds--with varying degrees of success--the codes and conventions of the form, its Anglo male protagonist, and the national project, but which contains resistant elements that undermine its cultural logic and status as a discrete, coherent entity. On the other end may be found the anti-Western, itself an unstable and shifting form that engages in a critical dialogue with the genre but that is also shaped by a certain desire for and attraction to the classic features of the Western. By understanding the Western as a genre structured by competing and contradictory impulses, audiences may make better sense of McCarthy's--and by extension McMurtry's--shifting treatment of the form.

Heath Lowrance on weird westerns

American Sniper as revisionist western. Interesting take, just not sure I agree with it.

Ben Bridges top 50 westerns

Interesting. I don't necessarily like the "neo" term but agree with the sentiment. The Western genre, in many respects, literally died. And that has to be taken into account when writing in and about the genre:

"Leonard’s novel was written just at the end of what we now remember as the golden age of the Western genre, at a time when the author himself had already migrated to more fresh and vibrant varieties of potboiler. Since then, time has passed, John Wayne has died, and the image of a ranch-dwelling man on horseback has been requisitioned by a series of decreasingly plausible American presidents. Yet the Western itself has never quite gone extinct. It lives on in the form of the neo-Western, the backward-looking descendant of the original species, distinguished above all by its self-awareness as a genre out of time. That is to say, the neo-Western knows that the Western is a dead genre, and it knows that we know it, too. And so it must somehow attempt to answer (implicitly or explicitly, through serious reflection or through mocking parody) the question of how this came to be."

Classism and the western

Section from an article from the mid 80s frames the Western in class terms:

"Like other literary genres, the western continues to evoke criticism and debate. ''It has always been split between two extremes,'' said Don Graham, an associate professor of English at the University of Texas, and an authority on western writing. ''There's the bus station western, the paperback original, that's mostly a lower-middle-class literary form -the tradition of Zane Grey, of which Louis L'Amour is the chief practitioner today. Then there's western American literature, by writers like McMurtry, William Eastlake, Wallace Stegner. What's interesting is that both forms seem to be enjoying a resurgence.''

Under Burning Skies: Best of 21st-Century Western Movies

Really interesting article: Lonely rangers: the dark side of westerns

HBO To Make Miniseries About Western U.S. Marshal Bass Reeves

“I think [the two genres] are both deeply connected to America’s ideas about itself, embodied in this figure of a lone American male as adventurer, staking out unknown territory, seeking justice.” Megan Abbott concludes. “There’s an intense romanticism to it (and a conservatism). Yet both genres are also very capable of rejecting the limitations of the past and updating themselves for more contemporary iterations (in other words, the hero need no longer be white, male or alone). Both genres can be eternally relevant in the hands of gifted writers.”

"Jericho, which has been called Britain’s first western, is based on the “frontier” community that emerged during the building of the Ribblehead Viaduct in the late 19th century. Peters plays African-American railwayman Ralph Coates, who fetches up in the north of England"

True West Magazine's best westerns of 2015

"For the most part, the best westerns are those that omit, or minimize, the origin stories. John Wayne made any number of westerns where it was understood that he was tough old cuss, tending to fat, but we rarely dwelled on how he learned to shoot or why he walked that way. Clint Eastwood made a bunch of films where he was just a scruffy guy who could outdraw anybody and walk away with a squint, and that’s all we knew. There were a couple of others like The Outlaw Josey Wales where his background was provided in record time and High Plains Drifter where it remained an ambiguous mystery, and only one, Unforgiven, where it was a large part of the point. There are any number of films where we first meet the protagonist as he’s riding across the desert, and already know that he’s a guy whose adventures we’re here to see, without learning about every single trauma that shaped him." -- Adam-Troy Castro