SOURCE: “The Novel of the Cowboy,” in A Literary History of the American West, sponsored by The Western Literature Association, Texas Christian University Press, 1987, pp. 523‐34.

In the following essay, Rodenberger presents an overview of the history of the cowboy novel and the evolution of the criticism of the genre. Rodenberger focuses on the most influential works and the effect they had on later authors.

For a century now, novelists captivated by the history of the West have been writing about the life of the cowboy. Fewer than a hundred novels of the cowboy genre can be said to have literary qualities, yet the genre retains a great popular appeal; and occasionally its adventurous narrative and cowpoke characters say something basic about the human condition.

Criticism of the cowboy novel seems to have gone through three stages of a refining process—somewhat like flour sifted through the silks of...