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.''

I'm reading Sixguns & Society: A Structural Study of the Western by Will Wright. It's really interesting in places and really egg heady in others.

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

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

"America's great cowboy epic consists of a hundred thousand simulacra (cast in forms ranging from novels and movies to model kits and lunch boxes) of an imaginary original. At that primal point where other cultures find their Ramayana or Iliad or Le Morte d'Arthur, we make do with rumors and fabrications, replicas of wanted posters and tintypes of miners' shacks, Owen Wister and Zane Grey, and the deathless ideogram of a man on a horse crossing an empty space. Because of this void, the epic can always be written for the first time, the pieces finally put definitively together, even if only at the bitter end, or, indeed, long past the end. If the western died some time ago, that death was only a way station in this longer cycle of unappeasable striving after the Total Western, whether it materializes as Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, Gilbert Sorrentino's Gold Fools, Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate, or the HBO series Deadwood."

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.”