Words on a Page

Until the end of the nineteenth century, the West was not situated in a static geographical location.  In its earliest guise, it encompassed all but the thinnest margin along the eastern edge of the continent.  Kentucky, Tennessee and Ohio – all states now firmly entrenched in the geographical East – at one time lay beyond the frontier within an unknown and unexplored western territory.  Until the latter part of the nineteenth century, the frontier retreated physically as each new wave of white settlement pushed it ever closer to the Pacific coast.  Since then, the frontier has retreated from us in time.  Consequently, the meaning of ‘the West’ has changed, and continues to change on a regular basis. 

Western American Literature: an expansive canon   Western American Literature: an expansive canon   The canon of western American literature encompasses many forms: popular and literary fiction; nature writing; personal essays and memoirs; and historical studies.  It is an area of literature which is nearly as vast as the land from which it emanates.  A brief survey of the novels which fall beneath its banner confirms the diverse range of work it includes: Zane Grey’s classic of the western genre Riders of the Purple Sage (1912); Willa Cather’s depiction of the female agrarian struggle in O Pioneers! ; A.B. Guthrie’s mountain man adventure Big Sky (1947); Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath (1939) and East of Eden (1952); and Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose (1972) are all novels which are widely studied in connection with the American West.  Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985); Annie Proulx’s Wyoming stories; Barbara Kingsolver’s BeanTrees (1988); Larry McMurt...

The origins of western American literature can be found in the written accounts of the explorers and adventurers who delved into the wilderness beyond the Mississippi River at the turn of the 19 th century.  Commissioned with exploring the newly acquired Louisiana Purchase, which had doubled the size of United States territory, and finding a trade route to the Pacific, Lewis and Clark ’s Corps of Discovery set forth in the spring of 1804 into a vast unknown. Over the course of nearly two and one-half years, the six men tasked with documenting the expedition produced enough material to fill the nearly five thousand pages of Moulton’s definitive edition of the journals.  In their close observation of both the landscape through which they travelled and of the Native people they encountered, the men not only recorded the events of their explorations but ‘gave reality to the Louisiana Purchase ’ (Lyon, 1999:5) itself. In the introduction to ‘The Written Donnée of Western ...