Preface
This book first appeared at the end of 1973. I was in my late thirties when I finished writing it, and there was a mere handful of studies of the western around at the time, most of them in French. Now there are a couple of rows of books as well as chapters in the numerous works on cinematic genres designed for use in schools and universities. Re-reading Westerns right through for the first time in over a quarter of a century at the age of 70 seems to confirm the old adage that the child is father to the man. It now seems like the work of someone from an earlier generation with whom I recognise some shared tastes and affinities. Inasmuch as the book is still of some value – which I think it is – then part of that worth resides in the fact that it belongs to and reflects a particular time and historical situation. That time, and I refer to it occasionally, was from 1963, when I began thinking of the western for an essay I never completed, to early 1977 when the revised edition was published. This was the period generally described now as the 60s but actually covering sixteen years, from the abbreviated presidency of Jack Kennedy to the election of Jimmy Carter. It was a violent, tempestuous era that encompassed the assassinations of Jack Kennedy, his brother Bobby and Martin Luther King; the Vietnam War; the rise of the counterculture; the destruction of Lyndon Johnson; the Watergate scandal and the disgrace of President Nixon, his Vice-President Spiro Agnew and many of their political associates. It was a time of political unrest and social divisiveness that seemed to threaten the future of the Republic.
I began the 1960s as an unreserved admirer of Jack Kennedy, and though reservations set in with the Bay of Pigs disaster, I wept at the news of his death and like most members of my generation I can remember with extraordinary clarity what I was doing that terrible day in Dallas. I respected Lyndon Johnson and was persuaded that he would rise to the challenges he faced domestically and internationally. As a result I supported him (producing several BBC radio talks that made out the case for his potential as a statesman), and until early in 1965 I thought, as a liberal antiCommunist, that his prosecution of the war in Vietnam was both
