Word: wister
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Negro Cowboys tries to explain the literary genocide that has erased the Negro from modern Westerns. According to Philip Durham and Everett Jones, two English teachers at U.C.L.A., the whitewashing of the legendary West began with Owen Wister's The Virginian, published in 1902. In an age that self-consciously hefted the white's man's burden and deplored the racial defects of immigrants, Wister gloried in the virtues of noble "Saxon boys" who conquered the frontier. Having met few Negroes in his own travels out West, Wister could see no reason to sully the racial purity of his novel...
Novelists like Wister and Dixon made "Saxon pluck" a standard ingredient of best sellers. "The product was successful, and so it seemed foolish to vary the formula...
...authors' explanation of the Negro disappearance from Western folklore is less satisfying. They say it is be, cause the first published western, Owen Wister's The Virginian, included no Negroes. Since the book was an extraordinary success, no one dared change a good thing. But by that time, the West was mostly legend, and the values of legend tend to black-and-white good guys and bad guys, and permit of little shading. As legend, the oldtime cowboy will go on looking like Tom Mix. History, thanks to Durham and Jones, has acquired new shadings...
...Sept. 19 The Virginian (NBC, 7:30-9 p.m.).-PREMIÈRE of a new series more or less based on Owen Wister's novel, with James Drury as Gary Cooper...