Waters, Frank - Thomas J. Lyon (essay date October 1967)
Thomas J. Lyon (essay date October 1967)
SOURCE: "An Ignored Meaning of the West," in Western American Literature, Vol. III, No. 1, May, 1968, pp. 51-9.
[Lyon is the former editor of Western American Literature and author of the pioneering 1973 study Frank Waters. In the following essay, which was first presented in October 1967 at the annual meeting of the Western Literature Association in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he discusses Waters's understanding of the different ways in which the West's immense space affects individuals, noting Waters's belief in "its psychic effect upon a people."]
It has become a critical commonplace, and a valid one, that much of American literature draws meaning from the contrast between culture and wildness. This juxtaposition of the great wild land and its original inhabitants with the recently implanted Anglo-Saxon civilization (which may be used for purposes ranging from humorous to satiric to...
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