While I am not a fan of westerns, I recently picked up The Pulp Western, which is considered the best book on the subject. Written by John A. Dinan, it was published in 1983 as the second in the I.O. Evans Studies in the Philosophy & Criticism of Literature from Borgo Press. It was reprinted with new material in 2003 by BearManor Media, and can easily be obtained from Amazon.
This slim volume (my edition is 130 pages; the new version is 170 pages) does a good job of covering this topic. We actually start off with the dime-novel western, before moving to the pulp western. And what makes the pulp western is made clear. Variants like the romance westerns, hero westerns, and others are covered.
We also get reprints from the original authors on plotting and writing the western pulps, their views at the time, and more. One long piece is an autobiography of B.M. Bower, a popular pulp-western author who was also a woman whom I’ve mentioned before.
Further pieces look at the conversion of pulp westerns into movies, the artists, and the demise of them. In many cases, the authors continued the tradition of the pulp westerns into paperbacks.
Overall, this is a nice volume, and I’ll be adding it to my collection of pulp-reference works.
If pulp westerns are an interest, get this one, along with Nick Carr‘s The Western Pulp Hero and Will Murray‘s Wordslingers: An Epitaph for the Western. These three are the best works on this topic.
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