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Reviews 153 Owen Wister. By John L. Cobbs. (Boston, Massachusetts: G. K. Hall/ Twayne, 1984. 140 pages, $15.95.) John L. Cobbs’sbook on Owen Wister, an excellent addition to Twayne’s United States Authors Series, provides a clear exposition of Wister’s life and career, an interesting and perceptive analysis of his major works, and a judi­ cious evaluation of his achievements. Perhaps the evaluation is a bit too “judicious”—too rigidly legalistic in application of critical statutes to do jus­ tice to The Virginian and to Wister’s bittersweet cowboy myth. But Cobbs succeeds admirably in interpreting the underlying contradictions of Wister’s life and work. Like his friend Theodore Roosevelt, Wister actually lived one of the most cherished of American fantasies, to be revitalized and transformed by “primitive” experience in the West. Yet though his western experience restored his health and gave him purpose, he judged its value finally by eastern standards: “He had a vision of the American West as the last fair field upon which could be judged the morality and culture of Western civilization” (p. 114), concludes Cobbs, but “he could not bring himself to turn his back on his class, and so he carried its prejudices and its fundamental shallowness into his fiction” (p. 115). Through dramatizing the cowboy hero’s ascent to social position Wister sought to integrate his aristocratic code with the invigorating spirit of a West he perceived as both nobly free and insolently barbaric. But he could only reconcile these contradictory perceptions by showing his “gentleman” cowboy ultimately affirming aristocratic values. Cobbs illuminates how Wister inte­ grated his passion for western experience with the elitist and racist convictions that became overt in Lady Baltimore (1906), which celebrates the doomed aristocracy in the Old South. Though this elitist aspect of Wister’s thought has been explored in G. Edward White’s The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience: The West of Frederic Remington, Theodore Roosevelt, and Owen Wister, Cobbs perceptively extends such insight, illustrating how Wister’s political thinking and prejudices structure both his observation and his symbolism. Though Wister dutifully portrayed his major cowboy heroes “growing up,” Cobbs accurately notes the predominant tone of elegy in this fiction, heightened in his last short story collection, When the West Was Won (1928). Cobbs’s basic intent is to highlight Wister’s difficulty in reconciling the oppos­ ing values his gentleman cowboy represents. Perhaps this useful study will focus renewed attention on the impressive achievement of this displaced aristocrat who deeply loved what he could never entirely accept, who more than any other writer made the cowboy a paradoxical symbol of conflicting American values. DAVID MÖGEN Colorado State University ...

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