The Dime Novel Western by Daryl Jones (review)

THE DIME NOVEL WESTERN BY DARYL JONES (Bowling Green, Ohio: The Popular Press, 1978. 186 pages. $3.95.) The Dime Novel Western offers both a well-documented history of the dime novel, concentrating on the period from 1860to the turn of the century, and a thoughtful analysis of the reasons for the genre's distinctive characteristics and remarkably widespread appeal. Drawing on over eighty primary sources, Daryl Jones traces the development of the dime novel from a story of alienated and often extremely unsympathetic backwoodsmen to that ofthe idealized and flashily-dressed hero who was the ancestor of movie cowboys such as Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. Informative as this historical portion of the book is, detailing changes in a form of popular sub-literature, the book's major contribution appears in its final third, where Jones relates the dime novel to literary history and offers a cultural explanation of the form's vast appeal. Jones argues convincingly the relationship between the dime novel and the romance, pointing out that the typical western hero is engaged in a "quest to reorder reality in terms of his own vision of the ideal world." The dime novels were thus tied to an ancient literary type while the questions which they addressed—such as the taming of the frontier and manifest destiny—were peculiar to the new world in which they were set. Readers were presented with a fictional world in which moral problems were stripped to their essentials, where good and evil were clearly contrasted. Jones concludes by commenting on the survival of elements of the dime novel. Though the little books either died or were transformed into pulp magazines in the late 1920's, the formula they had offered their readers lived on in popular movies and later in television series, where they continue to suggest "that a golden age still lies ahead." ROBERT E. FLEMING*»ROBERT E. FLEMING. Professor of English at the University of New Mexico, has published two books and a number of articles and reviews on American literature. In 1956 he soldhis first and only western storyto Double Action Western, one of the last western pulps. ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW ...