The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 89, July 1985 - April, 1986 Page: 231
610 p. : ill. (some col.), maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Book Reviews
to defend the follies of the Custer-like character Owen Thursday
(Henry Fonda), who vaingloriously led his men into a massacre.
There are also other stories of value either as writing or as pulp
source material. Dorothy M. Johnson's "The Man Who Shot Liberty
Valance" and Jack W. Schaefer's "Jeremy Rodock" (Tribute to a Bad Man)
are examples of the first. John M. Cunningham's "The Tin Star" (High
Noon) is an example of the latter. Incidentally, one story that should
have been included to increase the literary value of the book is Arthur
Miller's "The Misfits."
A good anthology should always turn up some treasure for the
reader, and this one contains a fine story by a writer completely un-
familiar to this reviewer: Steve Frazee's "My Brother Down There"
(filmed as Running Target, 1965). The editors call the film "an under-
rated contemporary Western" (p. viii), and I suspect they are right. Cer-
tainly the story is terrific, a lean, taut, and compelling moral examina-
tion of the thin line between hunter and hunted, lawman and outlaw.
Overall, then, this volume is decidedly mixed in its purpose and
achievement. Taken for what it is, as a resource for specialists in west-
ern literature and film, it is useful. Taken on its own terms, as a book
which proves that "heroes do still exist, if only in the pages of history
and the imagination of some of our best popular writers" (p. ix), it is
ingenuous.
University of Texas at Austin DON GRAHAM
The West Wind Blows: The Autobiography of Edward Everett Dale. Edited
and with an introduction by Arrell Morgan Gibson. (Oklahoma
City: Oklahoma Historical Society, 1984. Pp. xix+423. Introduc-
tion, preface, photographs, notes, index. $19.95.)
At some interval in his ninety-three-year life Edward Everett Dale
was a homesteader, cotton picker, woodcutter, store clerk, rural school
teacher, Harvard student, poet, government project researcher, uni-
versity instructor, research professor, director of the Phillips Collection
at the University of Oklahoma, author, and lecturer. He is most fa-
mous, however, for his contributions to western historiography. Even
so, most of his writings, rather than producing new knowledge derived
from intensive research, are vivid interpretations based upon his own
frontier experience. Few of his books, if any, provide as broad and ac-
curate an understanding of so many facets of mundane life as The West
Wind Blows, the second volume of his autobiography.231
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 89, July 1985 - April, 1986, periodical, 1985/1986; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth117151/m1/269/: accessed April 18, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.