zane grey published his first western in 1908 after a trip to arizona, not the movie theater. a year before that (1907) clarence e. mulford created the first in a series of hopalong cassidy novels. one year before THAT (1906)b.m. (Bertha!) bower started her writing career with "chip of the flying u." maybe someone who knows westerns should have written this article.

The author dismisses Owen Wister's "The Virginian" due to its "stilted prose and late Victorian morality" and therefore rejecting its place in American Western literature. Having read the book, I fear our judgmental author unfairly maligns the work in question; sooner should we dismiss his modern canon as "unadorned prose and late 20th century immorality" and condemn it too to the ash-heap of unloved verbiage out of sync with current critical aesthetics.

Isn't it a bit convenient that the author chose as his reading list novels mostly produced during his own maturity? (That would be why he chose "modern" novels, I guess.) It seems the major qualification for being a good western is its chronological coincidence with the reviewer's own era and aesthetic/moral choices.

As well as Zane Grey, I really can't believe you didn't mention Louis L'Amour!! For goodness sake, copies of his paperbacks sell for more then the cover price at flea markets!

Yes, he was a "pulp writer", a "formula writer"; he also was an awesome writer! And all those movies -- probably half were taken from his books. While coaster (people living on the east and west coasts) intellectuals may get their picture of the west from the authors you mention, people in general got theirs from L'Amour!

Even his most quickly written pot-boilers are good reads and some of them are classics in organization, form, style and characterization. Try "Last Stand at Papago Wells" for a beautifully constructed and written novel. They may not be "Great American Novels" but they certainly are great novels about America.

I'm only now coming to the Western genre in my readings, but it's clear there are numerable excellent works in the canon. One that the author missed in this article is a book I'm currently reading, "Warlock" by Oakley Hall. It's a complex and well-told work so far, with nuanced characters and a constantly shifting perspective that lends a Rashomon-like air to the turbulent events of the story.

I highly recommend it to anyone who has avoided Westerns so far, as it's not just a genre piece, but an involving tale of social, political, and romantic human nature.

First of all, let's call it a tie between "Lonesome Dove" and "Little Big Man". No other westerns I've read quite measure up to these two, but one that comes closer than any of the other titles Barra mentioned is Greg Matthews' epic "Heart of the Country" (1985). Not quite as good, but well worth seeking out, is Matthews' other western, "Power in the Blood" (1993). Both are probably out of print but shouldn't be hard to find. Oakley Hall's fine "Warlock" has just been restored to print by NYRB Classics with an introduction by Robert Stone. The other two novels in Hall's Legends West Trilogy, "The Bad Lands" and "Apaches" are also quite good. And don't forget Elmore Leonard. His westerns are almost as good as his crime novels.

Writer lists 'Blood Meridian' on his list of significant western novels. Also significant, perhaps, is the selection of that novel as tied (with Dom Delillo) for 2nd on a NYT survey of best american novels of the last 25 years. This means at least one novel in the 'western' genre is fully imbedded in the elite libraries of the 'AHrts'. (In addition, one reading of that book strongly suggests that every 'Deadwood' writer has memorized the text!)

blah.

Somewhere a line should be drawn between writers of the American West, and American Western writers. Among the prominent writers who write from the American West, we have others, like Steinbeck, and Kesey, (who tried to enlist McMurtry to get on the bus), Joan Didion, and Raymond Chandler. Among the poets there is Brautigan and Bukowski. While I appreciate this homage to the greatest American genre, perhaps some broadening of the concepts would enable us to lay down a few lines, and make the bibliography a bit more manageable. I note that McMurtry did not get the Oscar for The Last Picture Show, to which a story line like Brokeback Mountain would have only been an anecdotal story within the larger frame. A preference for the intensely personal story, versus the epic, may only reflect the changing face of the Western novel, or a watering down of the product, or simply a spreading out of somethin' thet's jes got too big fur its britches.

A few notable authors chronologically fall outside of Barra's thesis, and I think Paul Horgan deserves a mention, and Walter Van Tilburg Clark deserves more than a mention. The Ox-Bow Incident was frequently required reading for high school students of my generation, and for many of us our knowledge of Western fiction begins and ends with that novel. Since having to read it produced fewer groans than probably any other reading requirement (Silas Marner, Macbeth), you might even conclude we liked it. If it doesn't belong in the pantheon of great Westerns, we would at least want Mr. Barra to explain why. I would also like to recommend a novel that I think has remained in print since it was published in 1941 (the year after The Ox-Bow Incident) but is not so widely known -- Giant Joshua by Maureen Whipple. It's comparative lack of popularity is probably due to its being a girl's Western and about Mormons. It is a very good book.

Ole E. Rolvaag's GIANTS IN THE EARTH set on the frontier (in what is now eastern South Dakota) in the early 1870s. No one who has lived in that country and read the book as an adult will regard it as less than the definitive statement of the hardship and loneliness the common folk endured in "winning the West"

If one has never gone through a year or two, winters included, in the northern part of the American west between the Sierra Nevada and the Twin Cities, in a small town, can have a clue as to the physical circumstances under which the West was settled by whites. Cather alludes to it. Wister doesn't. Rolvaag lived it, and then he wrote it. Madness, sex, hardship, love - it's all in there, most believeably