and _Flaming Guns_ magazines,
the Southwest, along with all the rest of the West, has been represented
in a fictional output quantitatively stupendous. Most of it has betrayed
rather than revealed life, though not with the contemptible contempt
for both audience and subject that characterizes most of Hollywood's
pictures on the same times, people, and places. Certain historical
aspects of the fictional betrayal of the West may be found in E. Douglas
Branch's _The Cowboy and His Interpreters_, in _The House of Beadle
and Adams and Its Dime and Nickel Novels_, by Albert Johannsen in two
magnificent volumes, and in Jay Monaghan's _The Great Rascal: The Life
and Adventures of Ned Buntline_ Buntline having been perhaps the most
prolific of all Wild West fictionists.

Some "Westerns" have a kind of validity. If a serious reader went
through the hundreds of titles produced by William McLeod Raine, Dane
Coolidge, Eugene Cunningham,. B. M. Bower, the late Ernest Haycox,
and other manufacturers of range novels who have known their West at
firsthand, he would find, spottedly, a surprising amount of truth about
land and men, a fluency in genuine cowboy lingo, and a respect for the
code of conduct. Yet even these novels have added to the difficulty
that serious writing in the Western field has in getting a hearing on
literary, rather than merely Western, grounds. Any writer of Westerns
must, like all other creators, be judged on his own intellectual
development. "The Western and Ernest Haycox," by James Fargo, in
_Prairie Schooner_, XXVI (Summer, 1952) has something on this subject.

Actualities in the Southwest seem to have stifled fictional creation.
No historical novel dealing with Texas history has achieved the drama of
the fall of the Alamo or the drawing of the black beans, has presented
a character with half the reality of Sam Houston, Jim Bowie, or Sallie
Skull, or has captured the flavor inherent in the talk on many a ranch
gallery.

Historical fiction dealing with early day Texas is, however, distinctly
maturing. As a dramatization of Jim Bowie and the bowie knife, _The Iron
Mistress_, by Paul Wellman (Doubleday, Garden City, New York, 1951),
is the best novel published so far dealing with a figure of the Texas
revolution. In _Divine Average_ (Little, Brown, Boston, 1952), Elithe
Hamilton Kirkland weaves from her seasoned knowledge of life and from
"realities of those violent years in Texas history between 1838 and
1858