SOURCE: “The Literature Before 1900,” in The American Cowboy: The Myth and the Reality, University of Oklahoma Press, 1955, pp. 140‐57.

In the following excerpt, Frantz and Choate trace the beginnings of cowboy fiction to the mid‐1850s, with what is called “ranch fiction,” and follow the development of the literature through the turn of the century, with the publication of such novels as the popular Wolfville (1897) by Alfred Henry Lewis and the less successful Girl at the Halfway House (1900) by Emerson Hough.

A century and a quarter ago, a Yankee whaleship, the Essex, was rammed by a sperm whale with such force that her bow was stove in and she was swallowed by the Pacific Ocean within ten minutes. Nearly another quarter of a century went by before the Essex got her chronicler, Herman Melville, who made her sinking the climax of Moby Dick, his classic of whaling.

The range...