Document Type
Book
Publication Date
1978
Abstract
He was a cowboy and a lawyer, a journalist and a novelist. At ease passing the time of day with drifters in front of Melinda's House of Call at Watrous (Mora County) in the sparse territory of New Mexico or debating socio-economic philosophy with sophisticated Tammany politicians just outside City Hall in New York, Alfred Henry Lewis—Western regionalist and Eastern muckraker—was enchanted by America’s land of legend and myth beyond the frontier, and he forever glanced backward with nostalgia at his “pampas years,” when he roved "for many moons" between “the Canadian in the Panhandle and the Gila in Arizona.” Although he eventually established himself as a big-city newspaperman associated as editorialist and Washington Bureau Chief with William Randolph Hearst—to whom Lewis dedicated his first published volume of Western sketches—the man’s major orientation was not toward the “scoop,” or other sensationalist copy for printer’s ink. The glamour of his early experiences focussed Lewis’s creative vision on territories beyond the Mississippi: Kansas City, Missouri; Las Vegas, New Mexico; Tombstone, Arizona. In at least seven books he closely described life in a frontier town as seen through the eyes of an elderly prairie dog called, simply, the Old Cattleman, whose dialect wisdom brought Old West perspectives into the mind’s eye of Eastern readers. Indeed, according to historian Howard Mumford Jones, the famed raconteur of Alfred Henry Lewis soon became as legendary a figure hovering over the American landscape as “Captain John Smith and Daniel Boone” (The Age of Energy: Varieties of American Experience, 1865-1915, p. 89).
Recommended Citation
Ravitz, Abe C. Alfred Henry Lewis. Boise, ID: Boise State University, 1978. Digital. Western Writers Series, 32.