Making It New: 1900–1945 505happen to him, as he experiences the rugged wildness of canyon country and has
various adventures. But everything is summed up by one simple statement: Venters
“had gone away a boy,” from the East, the reader is told, “– he had returned a man.”
A man is what the eponymous hero of Shane already is when he appears right at the
beginning of the story. “He rode into our valley in the summer of ‘89,” the opening
sentence declares. Immediately, he is given the mythic status of a man who does not
even have to be named, set in the epic vastness of the West (he can be seen from
“several miles away,” we are told two sentences later), and associated with an elegiac
moment, the closing days of the frontier. There is the same awe in the narrative voice
as there is in The Virginian: this time because the narrator is recalling a time when
he was “a kid ... barely topping the backboard of father’s old chuck-wagon.” And the
story itself unfolds with the simplicity and inevitability of myth, as the narrator
recalls how Shane defended his family and the surrounding homesteaders against
the greed and violence of a cattle baron. Shane seems not so much a knight as a
natural saint, as he uses his strength and his skills to protect the settlers and, in the
end, kill those who would drive them off their land. And at the end, having completed
his mission, he rides off wounded into exile, never to be seen again. He has made the
valley safe for progress.
The mass production and circulation of popular myths of America took another
step in 1895 when a magazine publisher called Frank A. Munsey decided to revamp
one of his publications, Argosy, in two distinct ways. He turned it into a publication
devoted to fiction and designed for adult readers; and he decided to have it printed
on rough wood-pulp paper, which was much less expensive than the smooth paper
stock standard for periodicals at the time. The conversion to wood pulp enabled
Munsey to print and distribute a greater number of copies of Argosy and his other
magazines. And the rewards were immediate. By 1900, Argosy had a circulation of
more than 80,000 a month; by 1910, it was up to 250,000. Rivals soon brought out
pulp magazines of their own; and the pulps generally became the medium for
popular fiction, including Westerns. One pulp periodical in particular, Western
Story, was the main descendant of Western dime novels when they died out in the
1920s. It did much to confirm the character of the Western and the Western hero,
not least because its editors demanded stories with predictable plots and stereotypical
characters. Other pulp magazines devoted to the Western genre arose and flourished.
Popular “slick” periodicals, such as the Saturday Evening Post, featured Western
fiction. And writers like Grey and Max Brand (1892–1944), the author of a prodigious
number of cowboy stories (such as Destry Rides Again (1930)), ensured that the
general popularity of the Western, as a myth of American progress, continued to be
sustained. Illustrating that popularity is the extraordinary career of Louis L’Amour
(1910?–1988), a self-taught scholar of Western history from North Dakota. During
the course of a long career he produced two hundred novels and fourteen books of
short stories, all on the West. By the time of his death, those works had sold no less
than 182,000,000 copies.
Among the other genres popular in dime novels were detective stories. From the
1870s on, stories of street life in New York City, Philadelphia, and elsewhere cameGGray_c04.indd 505ray_c 04 .indd 505 8 8/1/2011 7:54:06 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 06 AM