The Western: A Collection of Critical Essays ed. by James K. Folsom (review)

322 Western American Literature manuscript (MSE) went forward, he entered changes in his own hand into both the manuscript texts. Once MSE had been forwarded to his agent in England Irving tinkered further with MSA, altering, adding, and deleting here and there. The first American edition (1A) of A Tour reflects still further intervention, some clearly compositorial errors, others the results of house styling, yet others probably owing to Irving’s characteristic last-minute adjustments to the proofs. However, because corrected proofsheets for 1A are not known to survive, MSA constitutes the closest available approxima­ tion to the author’s final intention and so is adopted as copy-text for the Twayne edition. Terrell carefully sets forth in the Textual Commentary her conservative approach to emending this copy-text. Of special concern — see p. 401 — are departures from the copy-text, particularly those in 1A, which may be authorial in origin and so warrant being included in the Twayne edition. Emendations are recorded in full, making it possible for one to consider all the editor’s judgments in this area. A valuable supplement to the familiar editorial apparatus required in CEAA-sponsored volumes is a listing of the substantive (word) variants between MSA and MSE. A Tour’s appearance along with the other two numbers of The Crayon Miscellany will keep it out of the home libraries of many interested readers. Perhaps Twayne will decide to issue the Terrell text of A Tour, with intro­ duction and abbreviated editorial apparatus, in an inexpensive format suitable for classroom use. WAYNE R. KIME Fairmont State College, West Virginia The Western: A Collection of Critical Essays. Edited by James K. Folsom. (Englewood Cliff's, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1979. 177 pages, $3.45.) It will be some time, I would imagine, before any collection of critical essays on Western American literature will be as satisfactory an introduction to the genre as this one, The Western, edited and with an introduction by James K. Folsom. Part of the success of this book results from Folsom’s excellent introduction which, though it starts out rather pedantically, turns out to raise some of the most important critical questions about Western literature. What is even more exceptional about this critical collection is Folsom’s choice of essays. The first selection is David B. Davis’ classic, “The Ten-Gallon Hero,” which is not only of scholarly value but is an excellent introduction to, and in the final analysis a defense of, the cowboy hero and his basic characteristics. The second essay, W. H. Hutchinson’s “Virgins, Reviews 323 Villains, and Varmints,” presents a valuable history of the development of the “cowboy” novel before finally concentrating on Eugene Manlove Rhodes, and it is written in Hutchinson’s highly individual energetic style. Next is J. Frank Dobie’s “Andy Adams, Cowboy Chronicler,” first published in 1926, which is not only an accurate though sympathetic analysis of Adams as western writer but comments further on some of the problems of the cowboy as writer. All three of these are relatively “old” essays, the most recent hav­ ing been first published in 1954, but all deserve to be republished. The next essays are more recent, though of such quality that they are destined to become classics of western criticism. For example, David Mogen’s “Owen Wister’s Cowboy Heroes” discusses the development of the Wister hero with a more detailed development of Lin McLean than of the Virginian, the hero of The Virginian, the book that most scholars see as the seminal cowboy novel. Yet, everything he writes about McLean is basic to the understanding of the later hero. The result is one of the most satis­ factory articles written on Wister and the cowboy. Since I had not read this article previously, I found it exceptionally exciting as a piece of scholarly analysis, but it was no more exciting than a re-reading of Max Westbrook’s “The Archetypal Ethic of The Ox-Bow In c id e n twhich had an electric effect when I read it in manuscript while J. Golden Taylor and I were select­ ing essays for the first issue of Western American Literature over a...