Bottom of the heap

The most important datum about Western fiction is that it is at the absolute bottom of the literary heap, somewhere below pornography.

Richard S. Wheeler, Chronicles, November 1991

Richard S. Wheeler

The last two books reviewed in this blog — Jack Todd's Sun Going Down and Richard S. Wheeler's Anything Goes — have been western novels, so obviously I don't regard westerns as "the absolute bottom of the literary heap," as Wheeler himself put it his 1991 magazine article. Wheeler didn't really believe that either, but that is  apparently what he thought so many others believed.

Western novels, Wheeler pointed out, are not read by the most educated people. They are never reviewed in literary journals. If bookstores, especially in the eastern half of the United States, sell them at all, they are usually hidden away in a small, isolated ghetto somewhere back in the store. (I remembered being shocked when I found Anything Goes on a "new books" table at a Barnes & Noble in Toledo. It's the only copy of the book I've ever seen in a bookstore.)

To me the bias seems to be more against writers of western novels than western novels themselves. When writers like Thomas Berger, Jane Smiley, Larry McMurtry and Robert Coover have tried their hand at westerns, after building their careers writing more highly accepted fiction, their efforts have been welcomed by the literary community. Even mystery writer Robert Parker won attention when he wrote a few westerns. 

Wheeler himself made a distinction between realistic westerns (the kind he wrote) and what he called mythic westerns (the kind written by Zane Grey, Louis L'Amour and Max Brand). Many of the mythic westerns, he implied, may belong in that literary ghetto. Obviously he thought his own work deserved better, and I agree. When most people think of western novels, however, it is probably the mythic variety — featuring gunfighters, cattle rustlers and range wars — that come to mind.

He wondered if westerns will ever return to a place of honor, or at least acceptance, in the literary establishment, and then he concluded his essay by saying that "whenever Americans feel good about their country, you'll see a reemergence of the Western." Right now, 30 years after his article was published, the mood of the country suggests western novels will remain at the bottom of the heap for some time to come.