Twentieth-Century Western Writers ed. by James Vinson (review)

Reviews 367 humanly sustaining values. So, if you ignore the phantasmagoric cover, you will be rewarded with an intelligent and forceful analysis of an American writer who deserves serious attention. CAROLYN JOHNSTON Eckerd College, St. Petersburg, Florida Twentieth-Century Western Writers. Edited by James Vinson. (Detroit, MI: Gale Research Co., 1982. 941 pages, $75.00.) The tabulation, classification, and assessment of writers is moving rapidly westward, perhaps indicating that at last the literature of the western twothirds of the United States has come of age. A Bibliographical Guide to Midwestern Literature (1981, with information up to 1977) began the literary trek west with subject bibliographies — Literature and Language, History and Society, Personal Narratives, Chicago, and soon — and then proceeded to approximately 120 author bibliographies, with these in turn followed by brief references to 100 additional authors. Contributors to the volume num­ bered 100. Books of this kind invite statistics. The first of three recent books dealing with western writers, as opposed to midwestern — A Bibliographical Guide to the Study of Western American Literature (1982) — begins with a listing of bibliographies, anthologies, general works, and special topics, and then pro­ vides “works on” for 388 writers. As might be suspected, there is an overlap­ ping between the two guides, midwestern and western, because regional boundaries are indistinct and arguable. The next two books are similar in format but quite different in coverage. Fifty Western Writers (1982) includes for each of the selected writers a brief biography, a discussion of major themes, a survey of criticism, and a bibliog­ raphy. Some of the contributors preface their material with a more personal note. There are fifty contributors for the fifty writers, a meaningful condition in that the reader senses a serious interest by each contributor in his single subject. Not so with Twentieth-Century Western Writers, an immense book of over 900 pages with information on 312 writers supplied by 74 contributors. Many of the essays on formula-ridden novelists (only fiction writers are included in this book) are by “scholars” whose chief interests are the detective story and science fiction — followers of the formula. Almost as many essays, however, were written by scholars well known to members of the Western Literature Association. The variety of approaches means unevenness in the critical comments: some of the contributions are weak, some unnecessarily argumentative, some highly informative, and a few offer fresh and worthwhile interpretations. A short biographical note for each of the writers is followed by a list of publications divided into “western” and “other” when appropriate. The 368 Western American Literature critical assessment is more often than not about one page in length. Living writers were invited to submit a short statement, and some have done so. Twentieth-Century Western Writers is, then, a source book on writers of “westerns,” some of them major novelists who get no more space than begin­ ning or obscure writers. No one is going to check every detail in a book of this size, but in general the biographical data are correct, even to some little-known facts. A few errors, such as allowing Forrester Blake to live on, are inevitable, partly because there must have been a gap of several years between the gather­ ing of information and the publication date. Perhaps the weakest part of the format is the “Critical Studies” notation, missing from most writers and inade­ quate for the others. The selection of writers included in this book, we are told by the editor, was based on the recommendations of R. Jeff Banks, Richard Etulain, Leslie Fiedler, James Folsom, Thomas Lyon, C. L. Sonnichsen, and Jon Tuska. These gentlemen managed to come up with an even 100 writers unknown to me. They also skipped a few who are listed in A Bibliographical Guide to the study of Western American Literature. Sonnichsen, who, if anyone, has looked into all 312 writers, provides an excellent Preface to the book in which he tackles the problems of definition of “West” and “western,” emphasizes the great variety of fiction that can in some way be called “western,” and discusses the formula and the myth as well. This essay must be consulted by anyone wishing to pursue further...