James Fenimore Cooper

Washburn, Mims, and Foley: Women Authors Leading the Western Charge

By David Cranmer

July 24, 2015

Long before Louis L'Amour, Max Brand, or Zane Grey thought about swinging up into a saddle, women were blazing a trail for the Western story. Even prior to 1902 with Owen Wister’s The Virginian which is widely respected as the novel that put the genre on the map, female authors were far ahead on the…

John Wayne as Hondo Lane in Hondo (1953)

Private Eyes and Westerns

By Bill Crider

April 28, 2011

“The private-eye novel was a western that happened somewhere else.”–William Reuhlmann, Saint with a Gun “The modern detective story and the modern Western have a great deal in common. . . .In essence both kinds of stories are American products, like corn on the cob and blueberry pie.” – Erle Stanley Gardner, “Introduction” to Davis…