western, a genre of novels and short stories, motion pictures, and television and radio shows that are set in the American West, usually in the period from the 1850s to the end of the 19th century. Though basically an American creation, the western had its counterparts in the gaucho literature of Argentina and in tales of the settlement of the Australian outback. The genre reached its greatest popularity in the early and middle decades of the 20th century and declined somewhat thereafter.
The western has as its setting the immense plains, rugged tablelands, and mountain ranges of the portion of the United States lying west of the Mississippi River, in particular the Great Plains and the Southwest. This area was not truly opened to white settlement until after the American Civil War (1861–65), at which time the Plains Indians were gradually subdued and deprived of most of their lands by white settlers and by the U.S. cavalry. The conflict between white pioneers and Indians forms one of the basic themes of the western. Another sprang out of the class of men known as cowboys, who were hired by ranchers to drive cattle across hundreds of miles of Western pasturelands to railheads where the animals could be shipped eastward to market. The cattle and mining industries spurred the growth of towns, and the gradual imposition of law and order that such settled communities needed was accomplished by another class of men who became staple figures in the western, the town sheriff and the U.S. marshal. Actual historical persons in the American West have figured prominently in latter-day re-creations of the era. Wild Bill Hickok, Wyatt Earp, and other lawmen have frequently been portrayed, as have such outlaws as Billy the Kid and Jesse James.
The western has always provided a rich mine for stories of adventure, and indeed a huge number of purely commercial works have capitalized on the basic appeal of gunslinging frontier adventurers, desperadoes, and lawmen. But the western has also furnished the material for a higher form of artistic vehicle, particularly in motion pictures. This was perhaps because the historical western setting lacked the subtly confining web of social conventions and mundane safeties that typify more settled societies. The West’s tenuous hold on the rule of law and its fluid social fabric necessitated the settling of individual and group conflicts by the use of violence and the exercise of physical courage, and the moral dramas and dilemmas arising within this elemental, even primeval, framework lent themselves remarkably well to motion-picture treatment.
In literature the western story had its beginnings in the first adventure narratives that accompanied the opening of the West to white settlement shortly before the Civil War. Accounts of the Western plainsmen, scouts, buffalo hunters, and trappers were highly popular in the East. Perhaps the earliest and finest work in this genre was James Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie (1827), though the high artistic level of this novel was perhaps atypical in regard to what followed. An early writer to capitalize on the popularity of western adventure narratives was E.Z.C. Judson, whose pseudonym was Ned Buntline; known as “the father of the dime novel,” he wrote dozens of western stories and was responsible for transforming Buffalo Bill into an archetype. Owen Wister, who first saw the West while recuperating from an illness, wrote the first western that won critical praise, The Virginian (1902). Classics of the genre have been written by men who actually worked as cowboys; one of the best loved of these was Bransford in Arcadia (1914; reprinted 1917 as Bransford of Rainbow Range) by Eugene Manlove Rhodes, a former cowboy and government scout. Andy Adams incorporated many autobiographical incidents in his Log of a Cowboy (1903). By far the best known and one of the most prolific writers of westerns was Zane Grey, an Ohio dentist who became famous with the classic Riders of the Purple Sage (1912). In all, Grey wrote more than 80 books, many of which retained wide popularity. Another popular and prolific writer of westerns was Louis L’Amour.
Western short stories have also been among America’s favourites. A.H. Lewis (c. 1858–1914), a former cowboy, produced a series of popular stories told by the “Old Cattleman.” Stephen Crane created a comic classic of the genre with “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” (1898), and Conrad Richter (1890–1968) wrote a number of stories and novels of the Old Southwest. The Western Writers of America, formed in 1952, has cited many fine western writers, including Ernest Haycox (1899–1950); W.M. Raine (1871–1954), a former Arizona ranger who wrote more than 80 western novels; and B.M. Bower (1871–1940), a woman whose talent for realistic detail convinced thousands of readers that she was a real cowboy writing from personal experience. Other western classics are Walter van Tilburg Clark’s The Ox-Bow Incident (1940), which uses a Nevada lynching as a metaphor for the struggle for justice; A.B. Guthrie, Jr.’s The Big Sky (1947), about frontier life in the early 1840s, and The Way West (1949); and Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning paean to the bygone cowboy, Lonesome Dove (1985). Many western novels and short stories first appeared in pulp magazines, such as Ace-High Western Stories and Double Action Western, that were specifically devoted to publishing works in the genre.
The western film can be dated from Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903), which set the pattern for many films that followed. D.W. Griffith made a series of highly successful westerns in the years before World War I. During the silent-screen era three actors achieved great popularity as stars of westerns. G.M. (Bronco Billy) Anderson, the screen’s first cowboy star, made hundreds of pictures that appeared almost weekly for four years, William S. Hart realistically portrayed a strong, silent man of the frontier, and Tom Mix dazzled audiences with his polished horsemanship and cleverness in outwitting outlaws. Other early cowboy stars such as Buck Jones, Hoot Gibson, Ken Maynard, William Boyd (Hopalong Cassidy), and Harry Carey contributed to a romanticized concept of the hero of westerns.
Most of the hundreds of westerns made from the 1920s to the 1940s were low-budget films that had only slight variations on standard plots. But an increasing number were “big” or “epic” westerns, a type introduced in James Cruze’s The Covered Wagon (1923) and John Ford’s The Iron Horse (1924). This type featured important stars and used larger budgets and modern production methods. The first epic western to use talking in its sound track was Raoul Walsh’s The Big Trail (1930). Other early epic westerns include Cimarron (1931), Destry Rides Again (1939), and Ford’s Stagecoach (1939), which starred John Wayne, the mainstay of many westerns. The singing cowboy, first made popular by Gene Autry and later by Tex Ritter and Roy Rogers, was an odd accoutrement of some of the westerns of the late 1930s and the ’40s and ’50s.
The epic western entered its heyday in the 1940s and ’50s with high-quality films by important directors such as Ford (My Darling Clementine, 1946), Howard Hawks (Red River, 1948), Michael Curtiz (Santa Fe Trail and Virginia City, both 1940), Fritz Lang (Western Union, 1941), William Wellman (The Ox-Bow Incident, 1943), King Vidor (Duel in the Sun, 1946), and others. Their films were marked by greater artistic self-expression and a somewhat more rigorous historical realism.
A new and intently serious western that could treat a wide variety of themes with sensitivity and dramatic realism appeared in the 1950s. Notable among these films were Henry King’s The Gunfighter (1950), Anthony Mann’s Winchester ’73 (1950) and The Man from Laramie (1955), Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952), Lang’s Rancho Notorious (1952), George Stevens’s Shane (1953), Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar (1954), Samuel Fuller’s Run of the Arrow (1956), William Wyler’s The Big Country (1958), and Hawks’s Rio Bravo (1959). These later westerns tended to dispense with the traditional models of the “good” lawman and the “bad” outlaw and instead treated their main characters as complex and fallible human beings. Westerns explored various moral ambiguities and topical problems by means of dramatic allegories set in the Old West, thereby becoming a completely sophisticated genre in the process.
The emphasis on human psychology and motivation continued into the 1960s with such films as Marlon Brando’s One-Eyed Jacks (1961), Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), and Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country (1962), but there was also a new accent on graphically portrayed violence, as in Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969). There was also a shift in sympathy toward the Indians, the previous film depictions of whom were remarkably lacking in both understanding and appreciation. This new sympathy was exemplified in Ford’s Cheyenne Autumn (1964) and Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man (1970).
By the time that Wayne made his last film (The Shootist, 1976), the epic western was clearly suffering from exhaustion, as cinematic attempts to debunk the mythologies of the Old West had merely resulted in the destruction of the genre’s credibility and relevance altogether. These efforts did, however, produce some notably lighthearted westerns, including Cat Ballou (1965) and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). During the late 1960s and the ’70s, low-budget Italian- and Spanish-made western films achieved some commercial success. Sergio Leone was the chief director of such films, and Clint Eastwood, his principal actor in A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), went on to direct and star in a few notable resuscitations of the western, including The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), Pale Rider (1985), and Unforgiven (1992). But by the 1980s westerns had almost ceased to be produced in the United States. They were partially replaced by the space epic, a genre in which often all the aspects of a western were utilized but the setting. Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves (1990), another film sympathetic to the Indians, was one of the most commercially successful westerns made late in the 20th century.
Westerns were also serialized on radio programs during that medium’s heyday in the 1930s and ’40s. The best known of these western radio dramas were The Lone Ranger, featuring the mysterious lawman of that name, and Death Valley Days, which was set in the Far West. Television also took up westerns in its earlier years. Such long-lived series as Gunsmoke, Bonanza, The Big Valley, and a half-dozen others captured large viewing audiences in the late 1950s and the ’60s, after which their popularity faded.