Review of Buffalo Bill and His Wild West: A Pictorial Biography.

Authors

Richard W. Ethulain, University of New Mexico

Date of this Version

1991

Comments

Published in Great Plains Quarterly 11:2 (Spring 1991). Copyright © 1991 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

Abstract

Novels and histories of the American West have always attracted a large, varied audience. Some readers, preferring stirring adventure narratives of the Old West, have bought Louis L'Amour Westerns by the hundreds of thousands, collected Frederic Remington and Charlie Russell prints, and mourned the apparent demise of TV and cinematic Westerns. Others, drawn to a regional West, have devoured Walter Prescott Webb's histories, the historical fiction of Willa Cather, A. B. Guthrie, and Wallace Stegner, and the regional paintings of Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, and John Steuart Curry. Still others, viewing the West as a significant global subregion, are attracted to the novels of Nathanael West, Joan Didion, and numerous ethnic writers, the histories of Donald Worster and Patricia Nelson Limerick, and the works of a panoply of experimental, expressionistic painters.