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Westerns wise and just. In the spring of that year doubts arose and well before the end of 1965 I was a firm opponent of the war. My allegiances switched from the Washington political establishment to the radical opposition among American students that had begun on the University of California’s Berkeley campus. This new and hopeful attitude seemed to be bringing together the dormant postwar demands for social change re-awakened by Kennedy, the Civil Rights Movement, the opposition to what Dwight Eisenhower in one of his last presidential speeches had named, and cautioned against, as ‘the military-industrial complex’, and a crudely confrontational approach to the Cold War. In the autumn of that year I spent five weeks in America on a BBC assignment – in New York, California and Texas – and, at a time when small-talk was in abeyance, found people talking of nothing but politics and social change.
My feelings about the United States became extremely confused and I worked on this book for a couple of years thinking I wasn’t getting anywhere, unable to pin things down. Eventually in order to fulfil an obligation to The Times on which I was about to renege, I offered the chapter on politics and the western, which only existed in draft form. It was published in 1971 as a ‘work in progress’ in The Times and attracted some attention. In the following week the head of the Department of Comparative Studies at the University of Texas, Don Weissman, phoned me from Italy where he was enjoying a sabbatical, and invited me to be a visiting professor at Austin the next year (coals to Newcastle, steers to Texas). Two days later the editor of Art in America, Brian Doherty, who had also read the piece, asked me to write an article on the Indian in the western for a special edition of his magazine on the culture of what we now call Native Americans. I suddenly realised that what I was engaged in was of interest on both sides of the Atlantic and that in writing about the western I was clarifying my life-long feelings about the United States.
For these reasons Westerns seems located in its time, and I’ve decided to change nothing in the original text of 1973 or in the Afterword that accompanied the revised edition in 1977. In a long, appreciative and appreciated review of the augmented version in Sydvenska Dagbladet, the paper’s witty critic observed that if every three years I added the same amount of new material, by the turnof-the-century a 170-page monograph would have swelled to 420 pages. However in the years immediately following his piece there