Black Masculinity and the Frontier Myth in American Literature by Michael K. Johnson (review)

2 1 8 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e S u m m e r 2 0 0 6 that, although Lewis avidly read detective fiction, he persistently “mock[ed] perpetuators of the Popular Western,” yet he himself wrote Mantrap (1926), a western potboiler (257). Chapter 6, “Instructor in Authorship,” opens the third section. Bucco portrays Lewis giving practical advice to aspiring authors while he “aggres­ sively promote[s] American commerce and American culture” (428). Chapter 7, “Reviewer of Reviewers,” exposes Lewis’s conflict with the Pulitzer Prize judges, his praise of H. L. Mencken and others, and his intensive, unjustifiable mockery of Bernard DeVoto. For his closing lines, Bucco aptly quotes Lewis (who ironically is echoing Howells) on the relation of his fictive characters to himself: “There is no Sinclair Lewis about whom the autobiographer can write outside of what appears in the novelist’s characters. Good or bad, ‘they have in them everything I have been able to get from life or give to life’” (457). Although Lewis’s self-assessment is revealing, it does not constitute the discerning conclusion warranted by so comprehensive a study. Instead, Bucco ultimately leaves his readers responsible for distilling the data and drawing con­ clusions about the author as thinker, reader (other than insatiable and omni­ farious), social gadfly, and literary critic. Exhibiting the facts is useful in itself, but explaining their significance in a few tight concluding paragraphs would have enhanced their overall value. Nonetheless, Lewis scholars will welcome this immense, detailed survey for its thorough exploration of his writings and its candid portrait of the author. Black Masculinity and the Frontier Myth in American Literature. By Michael K. Johnson. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004. 304 pages, $24.95. Reviewed by Kathryn West Bellarmine University, Louisville, Kentucky Among other services, Michael K. Johnson’s Black Masculinity and the Frontier Myth inAmerican Literature provides an example—and thus a kind of a test— of the application of some of the approaches and philosophies of New Western History to the study of western American literature. Johnson aligns himselfpar­ ticularly with Richard Slotkin and Annette Kolodny. Slotkin sees the “frontier myth” as shaped by the histories of Frederick Jackson Turner and Theodore Roosevelt; it is the narrative of the triumph of civilization over savagery and of the transformation of the civilizer from boy to man. Kolodny revises Turner to see the frontier both as abstract cultural crossroad and as specific geographic place. Johnson follows Slotkin and Kolodny in addressing the West as “shifting physical terrain where a first contact takes place” (12). Johnson’s primary project is to illustrate how African American identity complicates masculinity in the West, as well as how—and how diversely— African American authors have interrogated some of the key precepts of the B o o k R e v ie w s 2 1 9 frontier myth: that it offers a space ofwide opportunity, leading to the (typically erroneous) assumption that race restrictions and oppression aren’t present; that hunting is a ritual experience inherent to the frontier; that violence is innate to the frontier atmosphere; and that all of these characteristics shape definitions and realizations of masculinity on the frontier. Johnson finds that when African Americans write about the frontier experience, the result is typically a doublevoiced text, “a play on white mythology, [and] a recuperation of black history and literary or artistic tradition” (6). To establish the centrality of masculinity to the frontier myth, Johnson begins with a recital of relevant aspects of Turner’s thesis and then offers an examination of Theodore Roosevelt’s The Winning of the West (1889-1896), complementing his reading of these histories with corresponding scenes of the formation of masculinity from Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902) and James Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer (1841). He then turns to John Marrant’s autobiographical A Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings withJohn Marrant, a Black (1785) and Toni Morrison’s Paradise (1998) in order to illustrate an early African American experience on the frontier and a contemporary critique of the violence and isolationism...