
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
Recommended Citation
Brenner, Gerald John. "The New Western:Studies In Modern Western American Fiction.." (1965). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/amst_etds/137