SOURCE: “Clenched Teeth and Curses: Revenge and the Dime Novel Outlaw Hero,” in Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. VII, No. 3, Winter, 1973, pp. 652-65.

In the essay below, Jones explores the development of the outlaw hero in dime novels, arguing that the character emerged from the cultural context of the times.

Among the select brotherhood of Western heroes who live eternally in the popular imagination, one figure is strangely prominent—a man clad wholly in black, seated astride a black horse. Characteristically, his fist is raised in defiance, his teeth are clenched, and from the shadow obscuring the top half of his face two black, magnetic eyes are smoldering. He is, of course, the noble outlaw, Robin Hood in New World guise, a synthesis of timeless human desires and the unique combination of forces operating upon the development of popular American fiction in the last half of the nineteenth...