Literary History of the American West

SECTION IV
Beginnings of Literary Historiograhy

Introduction

WESTERN AMERICAN LITERARY CRITICISM had its beginnings in the eighteenth century, as Martin Bucco explains in the last chapter of A Literary History of the American West. After western criticism had developed for more than a century, the frontier closed in 1890, and explorers, adventurers, and pioneers could no longer encounter the Old West. Historians, political leaders, writers, and artists such as Frederick Jackson Turner, Theodore Roosevelt, Owen Wister, and Frederic Remington contributed to a new western literary historiography that argued the importance of the bygone Old West to the nation and to the new region that had emerged as a result of the westward movement. They were followed in the twentieth century by scholars such as Mabel Major, T. M. Pearce, and Henry Nash Smith, whose works helped to stimulate interest in the formal study of western American literature.

Such study probably began in universities before World War I. Certainly, by the 1930s western universities offered courses like J. Frank Dobie's Life and Literature of the Southwest, which he began teaching at the University of Texas in 1929.

Such literary study was often approached in terms of the theory of a history professor: Frederick Jackson Turner. "To the frontier," wrote Turner, "the American intellect owes its striking characteristics"; and from that theory he concluded that the closing of the frontier was a watershed event in American history. When Turner expounded those views in a paper that he read before the American Historical Association in 1893, his theory itself became a watershed event in the way that people thought and wrote about the West. No longer did Americans think of the trans-Mississippi region as simply a barren desert; thanks to Turner, it was viewed as the proving ground of the American spirit. Shortly before and during the years when Turner first expressed his theory, Theodore Roosevelt's The Winning of the West added force to the Turnerian view; and Roosevelt and other "strenuous life" easterners such as Owen Wister and Frederic Remington depicted the Old West as "a vanished world," as the foreword to The Virginian put it. In his chapter in this section, Ben Vorpahl explains why Turner, Roosevelt, Wister, and Remington were so fascinated by the West.

The Old West retained its fascination for succeeding generations of scholars, and the New West began to attract some attention, too. Fred Erisman's chapter on Mabel Major, T. M. Pearce, and Henry Nash Smith discusses them as representative of literary historians and critics who began to assess the achievements of the Old West from the perspective of the New.

In 1938, Mabel Major, Rebecca W. Smith, and T. M. Pearce published Southwest Heritage: A Literary History. This "pioneering critical guide to books about the region" was revised and enlarged in 1948 and again in 1970. Although few other literary histories of western subregions were updated as often as Southwest Heritage, a number of others appeared during the 1920s and 1930s, among them Ralph L. Rusk's The Literature of the Middle Western Frontier (1925), Alfred Powers's History of Oregon Literature (1935), and Franklin Walker's San Francisco's Literary Frontier (1939). Such regional critics had an effect not only on the local scene, but on American literature in general. In Southevest Heritage, Major and Pearce quote from an essay that Henry Nash Smith wrote in 1942 for The Saturday Review of Literature. Smith contended that regional critics helped to overthrow the genteel tradition by objecting to an "ideal of a cultivation and refinement of the human being without reference to place and social setting" and by maintaining "the human need for a harmonious adjustment to nature–not an abstraction, but a specific, tangible terrain; and to society–not a featureless aggregate, but a concrete group of individual persons engaged in a joint enterprise, governed by shared references to a historical tradition, and bound together by the common conditions of their life" (May 16, 1942, pp. 5–6).

In 1950 appeared a book that changed the way people thought about the Old West, that made it possible to see once again a variety of genres and a richness of expression in western literature, and that viewed Turner's frontier hypothesis as itself a product of the myth of the garden. Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth examined the western experience with the then-new American Studies approach and showed that dime novels and "Wild West" novels played an important part in American attitudes about the West, for men believed the myth even in the face of opposing facts. But in his chapter on "The Agricultural West in Literature," Smith also traced the steps by which the conservative social bias evident in Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales gave way to the equalitarian creed expressed in the stories of Hamlin Garland. "It had at last become possible to deal with the Western farmer in literature as a human being instead of seeing him through a veil of literary convention, class prejudice, or social theory" (p. 290).

A decade after the publication of Virgin Land, studies of western American literature began to appear in increasing numbers. By 1982, Richard W. Etulain, choosing selectively, listed more than five thousand items in A Bibliographical Guide to the Study of Western American Literature (University of Nebraska Press). Etulain also surveyed scholarship from the time of Turner in "The American Literary West and Its Interpreters: The Rise of a New Historiography" (in The Western: A Collecton of Critical Essays [1979], edited by James K. Folsom). By turning to Martin Bucco' S "The Development of Western Literary Criticism," one can see how the new historiography fits into the overall development of western studies. These studies suggest that there is much to learn from our predecessors' encounters with the West. Wallace Stegner has rightly warned, however, of the tendency to seek the Old West as an escape from the new. In a widely quoted passage from "History, Myth, and the Western Writer" (in The Sound of Mountain Water), Stegner offers an analogy which shows that the western past must be explored for what it can reveal about the present:

In the old days we used to tie a string of lariats from house to barn so as to make it from shelter to responsibility and back again. With personal, family, and cultural chores to do, I think we had better rig up such a line between past and present. (p. 201)

JAMES H. MAGUIRE, Boise State University

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