Description
Book Synopsis In their heyday, pulp westerns were one of America''s most popular forms of entertainment. Often selling for less than 50 cents, the paperback books introduced generations to the exploits of Billy the Kid and Jesse James, brought to life numerous villains (usually named Black something, e.g., Black Bart and Black Pete), and created a West that existed only in the minds of several talented writers. It was only natural that filmmakers would look to the pulps for stories, adapting many of the works for the big screen and shaping the Western film genre.
The adaptations of seven of the pulps'' best writers--Ernest Haycox, Luke Short, Frank Gruber, Norman A. Fox, Louis L''Amour, Marvin H. Albert, and Clair Huffaker--are analyzed here. Insightful and humorous, the work looks at how the pulp novels and the movie adaptations reflected the times in which they were produced. It examines the cliches that became a part of the story: the rescue of the heroine, the gunfights, the evil
