SOURCE: "How Ambivalence Won the West: Thomas McGuane and the Fiction of the New West," in Critique, Vol. XXXII, No. 3, Spring, 1991, pp. 180-89.

In the following essay, Morris praises McGuane as one of a number of regional fiction writers of "the new West."

Writing in 1980, in a special issue of TriQuarterly dedicated to new writers of the American West, William Kittredge and Steven M. Krauzer declared

The current status of western writing is similar to that of southern American writing in the early 1930s when a major regional voice, in the persons of such authors as William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, Andrew Lytle, and Katherine Anne Porter, was beginning to be heard. Just as the old south was gone, the old west is gone. Free of the need to write either out of the mythology or against it, the writers of the new west, responding to...