Overview
Ranging from the novels of James Fenimore Cooper to Louis L'Amour, and from classic films like Stagecoach to spaghetti Westerns like A Fistful of Dollars, Mitchell shows how Westerns helped assuage a series of crises in American culture. This landmark study shows that the Western owes its perennial appeal not to unchanging conventions but to the deftness with which it responds to the obsessions and fears of its audience. And no obsession, Lee Mitchell argues, has figured more prominently in the Western than what it means to be a man.
"Elegantly written. . . . provocative . . . characterized by [Mitchell's] own tendency to shoot from the hip."—J. Hoberman, London Review of Books
"[Mitchell's] book would be worth reading just for the way he relates Benjamin Spock's Baby and Child to the postwar Western."—The Observer
"Integrating a careful handling of historical context with a keen eye for textual nuances, Mitchell reconstructs the Western's aesthetic tradition of the 19th century."—Aaron M. Wehner, San Francisco Review
Editorials
The Observer
[Mitchell's] book would be worth reading just for the way he relates Benjamin Spock's Baby and Child Care to the postwar Western.Aaron M. Wehner
Integrating a careful handling of historical context with a keen eye for textual nuances, Mitchell reconstructs the Western aesthetic tradition of the 19th, which evolved out of James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking novels, Albert Bierstadt's landscape paintings, and the fiction of Bret Harte. It was the tradition, Mitchell relates, that the Western drew heavily upon in shaping its conception of masculinity.— The San Francisco Review