The Wister Trace

A master practitioner’s view of his craft, this classic survey of the fiction of the American West is part literary history, part criticism, and entertaining throughout. The first edition of The Wister Trace was published in 1987, when Larry McMurtry had just reinvented himself as a writer of Westerns and Cormac McCarthy’s career had not yet taken off. Loren D. Estleman’s long-overdue update connects these new masters with older writers, assesses the genre’s past, present, and future, and takes account of the renaissance of western movies, as well. Estleman’s title indicates the importance he assigns Owen Wister’s 1902 classic, The Virginian. Wister was not the first writer of Westerns, but he defined the genre, contrasting chivalry with the lawlessness of the border and introducing such lines as “When you call me that, smile!” Estleman tips his hat to Wister’s predecessors, among them Ned Buntline, the inventor of the dime novel, and Buffalo Bill. His assessments of Wister’s successors—Zane Grey, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, and Louis L’Amour, to name but three—soon make clear the impossibility of differentiating great western writing from great American writing. Especially important in this new edition is the attention to women writers. The author devotes a chapter each to Dorothy Johnson—author of “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”—and Annie Proulx, whose Wyoming stories include “Brokeback Mountain.” In his discussion of movies, Estleman includes a list of film adaptations that will guide readers to movies, and moviegoers to books. An appendix draws readers’ attention to authors not covered elsewhere in the volume—some of them old masters like Bret Harte and Jack London, but many of them fascinating outliers ranging from Clifford Irving to Joe R. Lansdale.

"The Wister Trace: Second Edition" will be a work of literary criticism consisting of the twenty-nine original essays on classic western novels found in the first edition and additional essays of commentary and criticism on such authors as Larry McMurtry, Cormack McCarthy, Willa Cather, Jane Smiley, St. Clair Robson, Dorothy Johnson, Margaret Coel, Tony Hillerman, Richard Wheeler, and Don Coldsmith. The new edition will consist of at least 25% new material. This new edition serves as a unique and informative critique of western fiction authors and offers a much updated version of the original"--

At every turn in the development of what we now know as the western, women writers have been instrumental in its formation. Yet the myth that the western is male-authored persists. Westerns: A Women’s History debunks this myth once and for all by recovering the women writers of popular westerns who were active during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the western genre as we now know it emerged. Victoria Lamont offers detailed studies of some of the many women who helped shape the western. Their novels bear the classic hallmarks of the western—cowboys, schoolmarms, gun violence, lynchings, cattle branding—while also placing female characters at the center of their western adventures and improvising with western conventions in surprising and ingenious ways. In Emma Ghent Curtis’s The Administratrix a widow disguises herself as a cowboy and infiltrates the cowboy gang responsible for lynching her husband. Muriel Newhall’s pulp serial character, Sheriff Minnie, comes to the rescue of a steady stream of defenseless female victims. B. M. Bower, Katharine Newlin Burt, and Frances McElrath use cattle branding as a metaphor for their feminist critiques of patriarchy. In addition to recovering the work of these and other women authors of popular westerns, Lamont uses original archival analysis of the western-fiction publishing scene to overturn the long-standing myth of the western as a male-dominated genre.

"Marcus Klein makes major contributions to American studies, literary criticism, and intellectual and social history. In a perfectly crystalline and crystallized way, he brilliantly exhibits how the American imagination was rapidly, unexpectedly, and utterly transformed as we made for the twentieth century. Klein demonstrates how immigration, popular literature, the rise of ethnicity, new psychological fears, and old fables mixed together to make modern America. No one has seen the underside of the American imagination so clearly and originally; but once we are allowed to see what Klein does, our understanding of our history and its vicissitudes is changed for good."--Jay Martin, University of Southern California

Range and diversity are aims of Tracing Henry James, which brings together 28 essays by established and newer Henry James scholars from eight countries in North America, Europe and Asia. The essays are organized into an introductory section, a group of essays on Henry James’s shorter fiction, one on James’s longer fiction, one on The American Scene and James’s travel essays, one on James and criticism, and one on Henry James’s letters.

Two Page Murdock Westerns From Spur Award-Winning Author Loren D. Estleman! Cape Hell Page Murdock is ordered to Cape Hell, Mexico, to verify a report that former Confederate Captain Oscar Childress is raising an army to take over Mexico City--and turn north to rekindle the Civil War. Unable to talk himself out of the mission, Murdock heads south on a steam train named El Espanto--The Ghost. The Book of Murdock Murdock dons a clerical collar to worm his way into the confidences of the wary residents of Owen, Texas. Seems a gang of ruthless bandits is terrorizing the Texas panhandle and all evidence points to the dusty cattle town as their base of operations. Murdock aims to unmask the gang, provided he can pass himself off as a preacher long enough to stay alive. This edition of the book is the deluxe, tall rack mass market paperback. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.