Ernest Haycox and the Western by Richard W. Etulain (review)

A productive author of Western fiction, Ernest Haycox wrote twenty-four novels and over two hundred short stories. Most notably for scholars of Western American literature and film today, Haycox's 1937 story "Stage to Lordsburg" was adapted into John Ford's landmark 1939 film Stagecoach. In his engaging biographical study, Richard W. Etulain chronicles Haycox's career as a Western writer, from his prolific work for pulp magazines to his later interest in breaking out of the Western formula he helped to define. In so doing, Etulain offers not only a valuable study of Haycox and his work but also a model for how neglected Western writers can be approached as both literary figures and laborers within a publishing industry that thrived on the Western genre.

Etulain's book begins with a brief account of the Western genre's emergence, from frontier narratives and Cooper's Leatherstocking saga to the Western genre's solidification into "something of a morality play" by the first decades of the twentieth century (18). This sets the scene for Haycox's entrance into literary culture in the 1920s, when he devotes himself to "learning and practicing the formula of the Western" that had become ubiquitous in pulp and middlebrow magazines (19). After establishing the literary context Haycox would encounter as an adult, Etulain then tells Haycox's life story, from his birth in Portland, Oregon, to a family that struggled financially and moved around a great deal, to high school, and to service overseas during World War I. Attending college first at Reed, then at the University of Oregon, Haycox wrote for campus newspapers, and in so doing, Etulain notes, Haycox would begin to articulate his worldview: "He held that one should be independent in beliefs and actions but not to such an extent as to isolate one's self from society" (34). This perspective has a clear affinity with the Western genre, in which isolated individual Westerners are often compelled to act heroically, in the interests of a larger good. In a brief foray into Haycox's politics, Etulain also remarks that Haycox's worldview would reach beyond his fiction writing and "helps explain why Haycox stood against Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and became a strong advocate of conservative Republicanism in the 1930s and 1940s" (34). This is a rare gesture in the book to the broader social and political currents that surrounded Haycox and the Western in the twentieth century.

The book's major focus is on the development of Haycox's literary career, from his short stories and serialized novels in pulp magazines such as Western Story Magazine, his later publications in the more prestigious and better paying Collier's, and his novels. Etulain details Haycox's vision of writing, which differs from more romantic conceptions of the profession, noting that "Haycox considered himself more of a craftsman than an artist. He was convinced that writing could be compared with plumbing, carpentering, or any other such skill" (71). Gradually, Haycox began to depart from the Western genre formulas he honed in the pulps, perhaps most notably in his 1944 historical novel about the Battle of Little Big Horn, Bugles in the Afternoon. He would continue this focus on history, instead of formula, with the posthumously published The Earthbreakers in 1952. In this novel, Etulain sees evidence of a broader conception of novelistic form, a more complex representation of character, and a nuanced engagement with history. Unfortunately, Haycox would not complete the trilogy that The Earthbreakers was supposed to begin.

Ernest Haycox and the Western portrays the life of a working Western writer, devoted to craft and the market yet not without literary ambitions. In the book's epilogue, Etulain reflects on Haycox's place, or lack thereof, in the canon of Western American literature and whether we should think of Haycox among genre writers like Max Brand, Zane Grey, and Louis L'Amour or among more "literary" figures such as Walter...