Westerns and The Private Library (Part I)

One of the genres that pulp fiction influenced during its heyday was the western:

         

Western fiction dates back to at least James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, though the West in Cooper's day was Appalachia, not the great (and, in Cooper's day, largely unknown) expanse west of the Mississippi River.

Actually, one of the major tropes of the western--that of the lone wanderer bound by a personal code of honor--dates all the way back to medieval times, to tales of the knight errant.  These chivalric romances were enormously popular in Europe up until the Renaissance:

 

Because both knights errant and the lone wanderers of the western often are called upon to save damsels in distress, there has been a lot of crossover between the western and romance fiction genres, crossover that was heavily influenced by pulp fiction:

 

But there are a lot of other themes that characterize the western, and we will examine several of these themes in more detail tomorrow....