America has lots of literature set in the midcentury professionalized west: books by Louise Erdrich, Ivan Doig, Larry Watson, James Welch, Cormac McCarty, and Wallace Stegner to name a few.
At first I resisted this opinion, thinking of Doig's ranchers, bartenders, and other characters set apart from this professionalization. But Bucking the Sun, Doig's novel of the Fort Peck Dam, is a pretty good example of succeeding, where Stout failed, to tell a good story centered on these dynamics. Thanks!
Good read. About the only acceptable emotion men could show in the Old West (and still too commonly in the New West) was anger. Anger often stands in for other emotions, of course. A well-veiled tear ("this dang dust is gittin' in my eyes") was allowed to be shed, though, if a man's favorite horse or dog died.
America has lots of literature set in the midcentury professionalized west: books by Louise Erdrich, Ivan Doig, Larry Watson, James Welch, Cormac McCarty, and Wallace Stegner to name a few.
At first I resisted this opinion, thinking of Doig's ranchers, bartenders, and other characters set apart from this professionalization. But Bucking the Sun, Doig's novel of the Fort Peck Dam, is a pretty good example of succeeding, where Stout failed, to tell a good story centered on these dynamics. Thanks!
Good read. About the only acceptable emotion men could show in the Old West (and still too commonly in the New West) was anger. Anger often stands in for other emotions, of course. A well-veiled tear ("this dang dust is gittin' in my eyes") was allowed to be shed, though, if a man's favorite horse or dog died.