This chapter suggests that the chief subject of Western genre fiction is the politics of individual freedom. Novels that take the American West as their principal setting and subject, such as Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902), Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage (1912), Louis L’Amour’s Hondo (1953), Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove (1985), and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985), along with short stories such as Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain” (1997), ask questions that are fundamentally about liberalism. The chapter suggests that early genre Westerns tend to imagine the American West as a romantic space of absolute individual autonomy, whereas post-1970s Westerns reimagine the genre with a critical eye, as if to acknowledge the myriad ways in which the frontier myth was too often a cover story for conquest. Over the course of its twentieth-century invention and reinvention, one persistent feature of the Western genre was the many ways in which it positioned the signifiers of the West in order to imagine individualism in America.

Bad Day at Black Rock is a Western set just after the end of World War II. The desert town of Black Rock, teetering on the edges of both a failed frontier and postwar disillusionment, was once home to a Japanese American man named Komako. At Black Rock, Komako had found water where others had failed – and water is worth killing for. After murdering Komako and burying him beside his well, Black Rock masks the deed by claiming Komako had been “shipped off” to an incarceration camp during the war. Examining the layered machinations at play in Black Rock's lie, this chapter turns to earth: it reads the landscape as a vital surround through which Komako and the incarceration of Japanese Americans physically and hauntingly manifest at Black Rock. It links the Western and the West to narratives of Japanese American incarceration, both bound to the settler colonial impulse that seeks to consolidate US power and authority over land, water, and people in the West. Simultaneously indebted to ecocriticism and comparative race studies, this chapter explores the ways Black Rock’s Hollywood Western becomes an incarceration tale – which in turn becomes a narrative of settler colonial eco-imperialism.

In the decades around the turn of the twentieth century in which the writer, literary theorist, and activist Hamlin Garland lived in Chicago, he made great efforts to make the city the center of American literature. While later readers categorized his work simply as Midwest regionalism, Garland believed that regionalist literatures constituted global avant-gardes and that developing regional literary centers would lead to a transformation of literary value. This chapter surveys Garland’s work across thirty years, examining his theory of literary localism, his investment in developing the Chicago literary and artistic world, his changing vision of the American West, and his deflected relationship to early American modernism. In addition to his most famous writings, Main-Travelled Roads and Crumbling Idols, the chapter discusses less well-known works including The Land of the Straddle-Bug, Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly, his writings on Alaskan mining and Native American reservations, and his biography of U. S. Grant. It also explores his affiliations with Chicago personalities including Henry Blake Fuller, Harriet Monroe, and the influential Chicago magazines the Chap-Book and Poetry.