--- Mark Sullivan <
DJ-Anonyme@webtv.net> wrote:
> This may be the wrong place for this statement,
but
> what about the
> cowboy?
Well, I did say "arguably." The cowboy is up there, too, but
there was less invention involved. Whoever
"invented" the western genre (not my field, I'm afraid)
started out not by creating something new, but by stretching
the truth about real people--Buffalo Bill Cody, Wyatt Earp,
etc. (I'm not talking about the earliest westerns, which I
suppose could be traced back to James Fenimore Cooper, but
the "action" western as we know it today).
Daly pretty much just made something up. The people he wrote
about never existed--not even close. He just invented a
character that survived in the supposed no-man's-land between
the law and the criminals (this is a huge theme in Daly's
work). Certainly, there were things like gangsterism and
police corruption in the real world of the 1920s that would
contribute to this development, but Daly invented the
hard-boiled private eye himself. No one invented the
cowboy--well, except the cowboys, of course.
Still, in terms of simple recognizability (there's got to be
a better word for that), I'd have to agree that the cowboy is
up there, too. Although I think we need to stop talking about
this--we'll never get into hard-boiled heaven this way.
G.
===== George C. Upper III UNC-Greensboro
(336) 393-0013 The city don't know that the city is
getting... a show with everything but Yul Brynner
__________________________________________________ Do You
Yahoo!? Yahoo! Auctions - buy the things you want at great
prices http://auctions.yahoo.com/
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 22 May 2001 EDT