American Studies ETDs

Publication Date

5-15-1965

Abstract

This is a study of a handful of American novels, all of them written since 1939, all of them concerned in some manner with the American West. I have chosen 1939 as a beginning point for the study because it was then that Walter Van Tilburg Clark published The Ox-Bow Incident, a novel which took many of the standard in­gredients of the stereotyped "Western and turned them to the uses of serious fiction. Unlike the hacks who followed the formula for success established by the dime novels and Zane Grey, and who dealt in fiction as in an earlier time they might have run a Faro game or prospected for another Comstock, Clark and other writers such as John Williams, Wright Morris, Wallace Stegner, William Eastlake, have stubbornly worked through the cliches to find, with varying degrees of success, a mature meaning for the Western experience. In the last thirty years a solid body of fiction has been produced by these men and others, fiction that is often tentative, unformed, unachieved, but even so, easily distinguishable from the "Western" by virtue of its craftsmanship, its complex view of human experience in the West, and its refusal to accept the worn formulas.

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

American Studies

Level of Degree

Doctoral

Department Name

American Studies

First Committee Member (Chair)

George Warren Arms

Second Committee Member

Ernest Warnock Tedlock Jr.

Third Committee Member

William Miner Dabney

Share

COinS