Growing up in Alberta, Canada, I spent many summer days at the Calgary Stampede, where I became familiar with the idea of the Wild West. We would don our cowboy hats and trek to the fairgrounds to watch bucking horses and chuckwagon races. Thus began my obsession with popular westerns. I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation on the subject, and I still teach courses and write books about various aspects of the popular West. As a bit of an outsider myself, I especially love Westerns by folks on the margins, without a lot of power. Their takes on the West are always quirky and surprising. I hope you agree!
This book breaks every rule I was ever taught about popular Westerns. Sure, it has a handsome cowboy and a damsel in distress, but he doesn’t get the bad guy, and she doesn’t want or need him to rescue her.
I was all the more amazed that it was written more than 100 years ago yet takes on modern topics like marital breakdown, alcoholism, and divorce.
Its story of a Western marriage gone bad really resonated with me because I grew up in similar circumstances, and Bower’s characterization hit very close to home.
B.M. Bower was an American writer of Western novels and short stories who wrote over 55 novels. Several of her stories were subsequently adapted and made into movies.
I love reading books by authors from the margins like Nat Love, who started life enslaved and later adopted a persona as a black cowboy outlaw.
His autobiography surprised me by combining elements of slave narratives, popular Westerns, and travel narratives. The result is a kind of crazy quilt of different personalities that Nat takes on as he moves from slave to cowboy to railroad porter.
I come from a working-class background, so I admire how authors like Nat have to be resourceful and reinvent themselves to survive and tell their own stories in a world where they have little power.
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Zitkala Sa describes her book as “a curiously colored seashell, which is only for those ears that are bent with compassion to hear it.” Images like this stopped me in my tracks. It perfectly captured my experience reading this powerful memoir of Zitkala Sa’s experience as a child on the Yankton Dakota reservation, a student at the Carlisle School for Indians, and later life as an activist.
It isn’t always an easy read, but like holding a colorful seashell to my ear, reading Zitkala Sa’s memoir feels like reaching across a vast distance of time and space to connect with someone whose experience differed from mine. Books like this have become so important to me in these times of division.
A wigwam of weather-stained canvas stood at the base of some irregularly ascending hills. A footpath wound its way gently down the sloping land till it reached the broad river bottom; creeping through the long swamp grasses that bent over it on either side, it came out on the edge of the Missouri. Here, morning, noon, and evening, my mother came to draw water from the muddy stream for our household use. Always, when my mother started for the river, I stopped my play to run along with her. She was only of medium height. Often she was sad and…
This is a Rubik’s cube of a Western. It feels so familiar in terms of its Western iconography and stock characters and motifs, but McCarthy twists the familiar tropes of the popular Western into bizarre and inscrutable patterns.
It’s a book I want to figure out but can’t quite, and that’s why I have re-read it several times. With each read, I’m confronted with a new puzzle just when I thought I had cracked its code.
Llewelyn Moss, hunting antelope near the Rio Grande, instead finds men shot dead, a load of heroin, and more than $2 million in cash. Packing the money out, he knows, will change everything. But only after two more men are murdered does a victim's burning car lead Sheriff Bell to the carnage out in the desert, and he soon realizes that Moss and his young wife are in desperate need of protection. One party in the failed transaction hires an ex-Special Forces officer to defend his interests against a mesmerizing freelancer, while on either side are men accustomed to spectacular…
I never thought of the Old West the same again after reading this book, which shows how the myth of the Old West was made by powerful men who created the West in their own image.
I used to think of Western vigilantism as part and parcel of the “Wild West,” necessary to keep the piece in the absence of “civilization.” Little did I know that the ones behind Western vigilante violence were powerful men using terrorist tactics to preserve their control over the land and its resources.
Bold’s meticulous research is as undeniable as it is thought-provoking and utterly absorbing.
The Frontier Club is Christine Bold's name for the network of eastern aristocrats who created the western as we now most commonly know it. At the turn of the twentieth century, they yoked this most popular formula to their own elite causes-from big-game hunting to conservation, immigration restriction to Jim Crow segregation-and aligned themselves with cattle kings and "quality" publishers. This book tells the story of that cultural sleight-of-hand. It delves into institutional archives and personal papers to excavate the hidden social, political, and financial interests in the making of the modern western. It re-reads frontier club fiction in relation…
Did you know that the first author to make a living from writing Westerns was a woman? B.M. (Bertha Muzzy) Bower wrote 60 popular Westerns between 1904 and 1940 and was among the most famous Western authors of her generation.
Bower was not alone, either. In fact, it was a woman suffragist from Colorado, Emma Ghent Curtis, who wrote what may just be the very first western, The Administratrix (1889), about a woman who disguises herself as a cowboy-gunslinger. Muriel Newhall created Sherrif Minnie, a straight-talking woman sheriff popular in the pulp magazine Romantic Range pages throughout the 1940s. These are just a few examples from my book of the many women who were not supposed to write Westerns—but did anyway!
I once saw a play at the renowned Oregon Shakespeare Theatre. A play about Sor Juana. It was a good play, but it felt like something was missing like jalapenos left out of enchiladas. The play kept nudging me to look further to find Sor Juana, and so for the next five years, I did so. I read and read more. I listened for her voice, and that is where I heard her life come alive. This isn’t the only possibility for Sor Juana’s life; it is just the one I heard.
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, this brilliant 17th century nun flew through Mexico City on the breeze of poetry and philosophy. She met with princes of the Church, and with the royalty of Spain and Mexico. Then she met a stunning, powerful woman with lavender eyes, la Vicereine Maria Louisa, and her life changed forever. As her fame grew, she dared to challenge the diabolical Archbishop once too often, and he threw her in front of the Inquisition, where she stood, alone.
Sor Juana's work is studied still today, and justifiably so. Scholars study her months on end; mystics…
This astonishingly brilliant 17th century poet and dramatist, this nun, flew through Mexico City on wings of inspiration. Having no dowry, she chose the life of a nun so that she might learn, so that she might write, so that she might meet the most fascinating people of the western world. She accomplished all of that, and more.
One day a woman with violet eyes, eyes the color of passion flowers, entered her life. It was the new Vicereine, Maria Luisa. As the two most powerful women in Mexico City, the bond between them crossed politics and wound them in…
