The Frontier is Gone, but Cowboys (and Girls) are Back
The Western is, quite frankly, a dead genre. One that basically doesn’t exist in contemporary literature. Hardcover sales (a proxy for “new” books since hardcover books are usually published first) of westerns haven’t reached more than 2,000 hardcovers as an entire genre in any week since 2020. The one exception you see on the graph below is a blip caused by one of Craig Johnson’s Longmire books, which was probably mistakenly labeled a western (Longmire is a series of law enforcement mysteries set in the West—you can see the confusion). Anomaly aside, this gives evidence to what many already intuitively know: westerns haven’t been “a thing” for a very long time now. Unlike the Agatha Christie mystery or Patricia Highsmith psychological thriller, which continue to echo forward into today’s literature, the western as a set of storytelling parameters has largely died out. It’s been almost three decades since the last gasp of the western—Lonesome Dove winning the Pulitzer in 1986.
Without academic study or living during the heyday of the gunslinger in popular culture, it’s common knowledge what the conventions of a western are. There’s an outlaw (the bad guy, usually) and a wanderer (the good guy, usually) who pursues justice on the lawless frontier and takes down the unsavory opposition. As with any genre, the western was iterated a number of times in its day—with various combinations of who is good and who is bad etc., but with the same essential arc.
Intuitively, it makes sense that this genre petered out when others have endured. A western is a simple story format with simple morals, and as we moved further away in time from the setting (the old west), it seems that writers and the public found that the creative well ran dry. Westerns are occasionally still written and made, but it is no surprise that they haven’t inspired nearly as many as the more psychological (why do people kill?) and evergreen questions (whodunit?) of other genres. The military/action thriller (you know the Jacks: Jack Carr, Jack Ryan, Jack Reacher) might be the closest contemporary genre we have in terms of narrative structure, but with a distinctive mix of politics and espionage that complicates the moral simplicity of the typical western. For now, and the foreseeable future, the western as a book genre is all cartoon tombstones.
But Wait, Are Westerns Really Dead?
If one were to pinpoint the very recent renaissance of the western, it would have to start with the dad-core powerhouse that is the television show Yellowstone. A Paramount show originally only on cable and streaming services that starred Kevin Costner, Yellowstone, like many hobbies/shows/etc. became a pandemic-fueled, massive hit. Yellowstone is a pure western as we remember them in popular imagination with only a tad more contemporary sensitivity, but it is essentially human drama punctuated by a gun fight. Not to psychologize the viewing audiences too much, but the appeal of Yellowstone seemed to fit the easy watching, escapist stories that people wanted during the pandemic, set appropriately in the wide-open expanse of free-to-be wild west. It was one of the first shows to start filming again in COVID because it became so popular.
But one television show does not make for an entire rebirth of a genre. Nothing would puncture this emerging bubble more than Kevin Costner defecting from Yellowstone and making his own western film epic Horizon, which came out a little over a month ago. Costner reportedly spent $38 million dollars of his own money to fund the project. Any artist willing to put that much of their own money into their art is worth rooting for. Unfortunately, Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 wasn’t a huge success, grossing around a fourth of its reported final $100 million dollar budget. That’s not surprising and the film itself makes a pretty strong case for why the western genre has died as a storytelling medium. The movie is an absolute mess of editing and cliched western genre storytelling, from the Apache raid, to rescuing a woman of the night, all the way to the final shootout. Yellowstone very well might have been an exception with Horizon being the rule.
Cowboy Culture Rides into Town
The frontier is likely to remain a relic of the past, but Yellowstone portended a trend in culture writ large: the wild west is back in a big way. This year Beyoncé made a country album Cowboy Carter, the rapper Post Malone just put out a country album, this is the #1 song on the billboard top 100. Like it is in music, “western” is emerging in fashion, and funnily enough books that are not actually westerns, but romances put in a western setting.
The western is coming back into popular culture without any of the connotations from bygone eras that made it a genre and a milieu in the first place. The western is no longer about outlaw and sheriff, but simply about cowboys, boots, and dusty saloons. In other words, the western is coming back strong as an aesthetic, not an art. Country music provides a clearer lens than anything to this transformation. Most popular “country” music today is virtually unrecognizable from its folk ballad roots of the 1920s. Country music is now pop music through and through. What is now considered country is really just smashed together with other genres of popular music, set to autotune, and merged entirely such that the only discernible difference between a “country” hit and a “rap” one is the clichéd dictionary each pulls from (trucks, porches, whisky vs. money, guns, sex).
There are not popular western novels any longer, just ones using cowboys and girls as a setting, a costume to put characters in and tell other stories. Look around any mainstream clothing store in the United States and you’d think the western is making a comeback, but that’s exactly what makes the reemergence of the western a trend and not a movement. Don’t expect to see westerns filling the shelves of bookstores, country music to suddenly get back to its roots, or cowboy movies to grace your marquee for very much longer.
Westerns were huge when I was a kid. They had their own section in the library in Belfast.