SOURCE: Marovitz, Sanford E. “Romance or Realism? Western Periodical Literature: 1893-1902.” Western American Literature 10, no. 1 (May 1975): 45-58.

In the following essay, Marovitz assesses western-themed popular literature that appeared in four late nineteenth-century American periodicals.

Two kinds of American fiction flourished during the decade preceding the publication of Owen Wister's The Virginian and Andy Adams' The Log of a Cowboy in 1902 and 1903 respectively, but the peak of one had already passed, and the heyday of the other was yet to come. The Virginian—with its idealized cowboy hero and schoolmarm heroine, its unredeemable villain, its lynching and its gunplay—had its American origin in the work of James Fenimore Cooper and Bret Harte, but it was nevertheless the first novel to include such an array of the actions and characters that ultimately would become the stock of myriads of “Western” writers from Zane Grey to those of our own...