Frontier tales became popular in the United States with the legends that grew up around real-life heroes such as Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and Sam Houston. James Fenimore Cooper was one of the first to tap into the desire for frontier stories with his Leatherstocking Tales. L'Amour's fiction fits somewhere in between the literary quality of Cooper and that of the dime novels of the turn of the century; he is the fictional heir to Zane Grey, though he has said that he dislikes being pigeon-holed as a modern-day Zane Grey. Like Grey and other western writers (Max Brand, Ernest Haycox, and Luke Short), L'Amour creates a romanticized, popular epic version of the West, not as it was but as he thinks it ought to have been.

Current writers who treat the West in less formulaic and idealized fiction include John Seelye (The Kid, 1972), E. L...