Volume 39, Number 5 · March 5, 1992
Killing Time
By Geoffrey O'Brien
West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns
by Jane Tompkins
Oxford University Press, 264 pp., $21.95
Western Films: A Complete Guide
by Brian Garfield
Da Capo, 386 pp., $16.95 (paper)
Box-Office Buckaroos: The Cowboy Hero from the Wild West Show to the Silver Screen
by Robert Heide, by John Gilman
Abbeville, 207 pp., $19.95 (paper)
The BFI Companion to the Western
edited by Edward Buscombe, forward by Richard Schickel
Da Capo, 432 pp., $26.95 (paper)
The Western
edited by Phil Hardy
Aurum Press, 416 pp., £30
What did Josef Stalin and Douglas MacArthur, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Sherwood Anderson, Jorge Luis Borges, Akira Kurosawa, and the janitor of a rooming house I once lived in have in common? They all loved Westerns. Such a taste was a leveling factor of modern culture, cutting across classes and nationalities. Whether as pulp stories, novels, movies, or television shows, Westerns were basic cultural wallpaper for most of the century, offering the simplest of simple pleasures: a fist fight on the roof of a stagecoach, a body falling out of a window, a man drinking from a river, a horse crossing a plain at full gallop.
Review, 6172 words
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