SOURCE: "The American Myth Rides the Range: Owen Wister's 'Man on Horseback'," in Southwest Review, Vol. XXXVI, No. 3, Summer, 1951, pp. 157-63.

In the following essay, Boatwright critiques the image of the cowboy as hero, particularly in the works of Owen Wister.

If, while you were in your neighborhood grocery this morning, or any morning this year, you went to the rack and picked up at random a two-bit novel, the chances are one in five that the novel was a western. If you read the comic strips in your daily paper, in at least one and possibly four you followed the adventures of man on horseback. If you looked over the offering on your magazine stand, you probably saw no fewer than twenty-five of the fifty or more pulpwood magazines and a dozen of the twenty or more comic books devoted exclusively to westerns. If you read all...