SOURCE: “The Cowboy in Short Fiction,” in A Literary History of the American West, sponsored by The Western Literature Association, Texas Christian University Press, 1987, pp. 515‐22.

In the following essay, Hutchinson argues that the popularity of the cowboy as a principal character in short fiction lasted only as long as did the mass‐circulated American periodicals, which flourished during the first decades of the 1900s and created a huge market for cowboy fiction.

The cowboy as a prominent figure in American short fiction lived for only the first three or four decades of the twentieth century. The main reason for this foreshortened life‐span should be obvious: these decades were the great age in American culture of the general, mass‐circulation periodicals, and such periodicals created a demand for cowboy fiction. With the death of the general magazines, the cowboy in short fiction also more or less expired.

The...