page_title: Western Romance literature
section_title: Wister, Grey, Harte, Cooper and male writers
hierarchical_section_title: Western Romance literature / 1800s-1950s / Wister, Grey, Harte, Cooper and male writers
caption_attribution_description: English: Marianne Koch and Clint Eastwood in Sergio Leone’s classic Spaghetti Western and first entry in his Man With No Name series, A Fistful of Dollars also known as Per un pugno di dollari.
context_page_description: Western Romance literature denotes a genre subset of Romance literature, sometimes referred to as cowboy romance. Works within this category typically adhere to the characteristics of Romance but take place in a western setting, frequently the American frontier. Though often historical, the genre is not restricted to romantic works set in the period of American settlement but extends to contemporary romantic works that centre around cowboys or other tropes of the western genre.
  The genre originated in the 1800s, popularised by the works of Bret Harte, Zane Grey and Catharine Sedgwick who wrote love stories about cowboys and their heroines, and often their conflict with Native Americans. The genre gained mass readership in the 1950s with the rise of Ranch Romance magazines and in modern day, the Western Romance pulp fiction novel like that published by Mills and Boon or Harlequin.
  These stories typically follow the romance of a cowboy, ranch hand or bull rider and his heroine, contrasting the fragility of love with the severity of the harsh landscape. They're usually set on the American frontier, rurally, in a ranch or on a farm.
context_section_description: The Western Romance genre dates back to the early 1800s with the rise of the classic cowboy and the pursuit of his heroine.  Authors such as Zane Grey, Bret Harte and James Fenimore Cooper dominated this period.
  Before the genre peaked in the early 1900s, authors such as Owen Wister and Sir Walter Scott paved the way for the rise of the Western Romance genre. Grey was influenced by the likes of Wister, specifically by Wister's most famous novel, The Virginian (1902). It celebrated romance on the American frontier and oscillated, (as is characteristic of the genre) between the beauty of a woman's love and the treachery and violence of the landscape.  Wister's work was characterised by his intermeshing of romance conventions with social realism, incorporating ideas of class and heritage to reflect the concerns of his time
  It was within their work that the “Indian killing, heroine rescuing” cowboy came to be. Grey became known for his work in this genre (under the publisher, Harper's) and the hugely successful Western Romantic novel Riders of the Purple Sage (1912).  The novel centres around a cowboy named Lassister and his relationship with his virginal heroine, Jane, set against the backdrop of the severe American frontier.  According to Danney Goble, it was “Grey's combination of brutal violence and saccharine romance - a heady mixture all but unknown to his predecessors in the writing of frontier fiction – [that] established his claim to a gold mine which he exploited time and again”.  Many critics suggest Grey's romances offered a vision of hope in America, the triumph of good over evil, the unity of the cowboy and his heroine and the prevailing of traditional values in world rocked by war and social upheaval.
  James Fenimore Cooper was another influential writer of Western Romance fiction in the 19th century as was Bret Harte, both having become known for furthering the myth of the idealised cowboy in Romantic literature.  Cooper has been credited as the father of Western literature, and a pioneer in Western Romance writing specifically. His 1826 novel, The Last of the Mohicans (the second instalment of three in The Leather Stocking Tales) is considered one of the most beloved works within the genre. In fact, the 1993 film adaptation also gained great success.  The Last of the Mohicans created the framework for Western Romance literature from then on, establishing tropes like the ‘captive heroine’, adhering to ideologies of 19th century America that praised progress and reflected a changing relationship with Native Americans.
caption: Marianne Koch and Clint Eastwood in Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars (1964).
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