| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 40.1

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 40.1 | The History Cooperative

*The American Western*. By Stephen McVeigh. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. viii + 240 pp. Bibliography, index. $85.00, cloth; $26.00, paper.)
The book's title and 220 pages of text would suggest a broad, but compact, overview of a subject that in its various aspects continues to attract substantive scholarship. Chronologically this study does trace the development of the American Western from the 1890s to 9/11 and also goes beyond the oft-written subject of Western movies to include literary and historical works. At the same time, the author narrows his focus to tracking western narratives as "fundamentally connected to the evolving political culture of the United States" and devotes well over half of his text to a mostly political reading of western movies—and most of those since 1950 (p. viii).	1
McVeigh credits Theodore Roosevelt, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Buffalo Bill Cody—among others at the turn of the twentieth century—with deliberately constructing mythic representations of the West in response to anxieties generated by the changing cultural-political landscape. Owen Wister and Jack Schaefer figure prominently in literary creations of the cowboy and gunfighter mystiques, and it is the latter that McVeigh highlights in his treatment of films following a brief overview of the genre's development from the early silent films to the introspective noir cycle of the 1940s.	. . .

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