The western occupies a permanent place in American literature, as it does in other media.

The individualism of the American culture seems nowhere better captured than in stories of the cowboy—the ultimate American hero—and in rugged individualists who populated the landscape of the West. The western appeals to the need for freedom, wide open spaces and frontiers, self-sufficiency, triumphing over adversaries and survival against the elements. Westerners’ corrals, groups of collectors, writers and historians all write about the history way of life and heroes of the West, past and present.

Westerns are nonetheless interpretations and ideologies. Stereotyped plots, overly romantic dialogue and misuse of dialect characterize one popular form of western. As Diana Herald writes in Genreflecting: “the stereotypic western can be recognized on the first page: a lone rider is crossing a valley or desert and a shot knocks off his hat or hits a rock, startling his horse, and a range war begins” (1995:18). Other themes and types of westerns include plots about wagon trains moving west, mule trains and stage lines, mining and lost mines, captivities, cattle ranching and cattle drives, range wars, boys becoming men, romance, picaresque heroes and parodies of cowboys. Texas and Mexico and American Indian territories provide settings and issues. Characters include mountain men, buffalo runners, black cowboys, Mormons, marshals, strong women, doctors, preachers and celebrity characters.

Popular series have been written by Louis L’Amour and Hank Mitchem, among many others, providing a seeming masculine counterpart to female-oriented romances.

Contemporary westerns, such as those by Barbara Kingsolver, Edward Abbey and William Eastlake, set in the twentieth century keep the themes of the cowboy wide open spaces, wild adventures and Indian-Anglo relations, although they may add on more environmental sensitivity or an Indian viewpoint (e.g. Tony Hillerman’s Southwestern mysteries). Larry McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy have also added new literary dimensions to classic scenarios.

Other contemporary trends include “adult” westerns of heroic, sexual adventures that started with Playboy Press in 1975. The western, as a genre, has been the subject of numerous parodies as well. Even these underscore its place in the myth-making of all America.