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Western Fiction
Western fiction is a genre of literature set in the American Old West frontier and typically set from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century. Well-known writers of Western fiction include Zane Grey from the early 20th century and Louis L'Amour from the mid-20th century. The genre peaked around the early 1960s, largely due to the popularity of televised Westerns such as ''Bonanza''. Readership began to drop off in the mid- to late 1970s and reached a new low in the 2000s. Most bookstores, outside a few west American states, only carry a small number of Western fiction books. History Pre-1850s The predecessor of the Western in American literature emerged early with tales of the frontier. The most famous of the early 19th-century frontier novels were James Fenimore Cooper's five novels comprising the '' Leatherstocking Tales''. Cooper's novels were largely set in what was at the time the American frontier: the Appalachian Mountains and areas west of there. As did ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Western Culture
Western culture, also known as Western civilization, European civilization, Occidental culture, Western society, or simply the West, refers to the Cultural heritage, internally diverse culture of the Western world. The term "Western" encompasses the social norms, ethical values, Tradition, traditional customs, belief systems, political systems, Cultural artifact, artifacts and technology, technologies primarily rooted in History of Europe, European and History of the Mediterranean region, Mediterranean histories. A broad concept, "Western culture" does not relate to a region with fixed members or geographical confines. It generally refers to the classical era cultures of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome that expanded across the Mediterranean basin and Europe, and later circulated around the world predominantly through colonization and globalization. Historically, scholars have closely associated the idea of Western culture with the classical era of Greco-Roman antiquity. Howeve ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Penny Dreadful
Penny dreadfuls were cheap popular Serial (literature), serial literature produced during the 19th century in the United Kingdom. The pejorative term is roughly interchangeable with penny horrible, penny awful, and penny blood. The term typically referred to a story published in weekly parts of 8 to 16 pages, each costing one Penny (British pre-decimal coin), penny. The subject matter of these stories was typically sensational, focusing on the exploits of detectives, criminals, or supernatural entities. First published in the 1830s, penny dreadfuls featured characters such as Sweeney Todd, Dick Turpin, Varney the Vampire, and Spring-heeled Jack. The BBC called penny dreadfuls "a 19th-century British publishing phenomenon". In America in the 1840s, a similar class of consumer content developed known as City mysteries, city mysteries. By the 1850s, there were up to a hundred publishers of penny-fiction, and in the 1860s and 1870s more than a million boys' periodicals were sold per ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Curse Of Capistrano
''The Curse of Capistrano'' is a 1919 novel by Johnston McCulley and the first work to feature the Californio character Don Diego de la Vega, the masked hero also called Zorro. It first appeared as a five-part magazine serial. The story was adapted into the silent film ''The Mark of Zorro'' in 1920. It appeared in book form in 1924, also using the title ''The Mark of Zorro.'' Publication history Before being published in book form, ''The Curse of Capistrano'' appeared as five serialized installments in the pulp magazine '' All-Story Weekly''. In 1920, the story was adapted as the silent film '' The Mark of Zorro'' starring Douglas Fairbanks as the hero Don Diego Vega. The title was a reference to the hero's habit of marking enemies or surfaces with three sword cuts, forming a letter "Z." The film met with enormous success, leading to public demand for more Zorro stories. In 1922, McCulley began a new series of over 60 serialized stories in ''Argosy All-Story Weekly''. Many of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Zorro
Zorro ( or , Spanish for "fox") is a fictional character created in 1919 by American Pulp magazine, pulp writer Johnston McCulley, appearing in works set in the Pueblo de Los Ángeles in Alta California. He is typically portrayed as a dashing masked Vigilantism, vigilante who defends the commoners and Indigenous peoples of California against corrupt, tyrannical officials and other villains. His signature all-black costume includes a cape, a Cordovan hat (''sombrero cordobés''), and a mask covering the upper half of his face. In the stories, Zorro has a high Bounty (reward), bounty on his head, but he is too skilled and cunning for the bumbling authorities to catch, and he also delights in publicly humiliating them. The townspeople thus started calling him ''"El Zorro"'', because of his foxlike cunning and charm. Zorro is an Acrobatics, acrobat and an expert in various weapons. Still, the one he employs most frequently is his rapier, which he often uses to carve the initial " ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Johnston McCulley
John William Johnston McCulley (February 2, 1883 – November 23, 1958) was an American writer of hundreds of stories, fifty novels and numerous screenplays for film and television, and the creator of the character Zorro. Biography Born in Ottawa, Illinois, and raised in Chillicothe, Illinois, McCulley graduated from Chillicothe Township High School in 1901. He started as a police reporter for '' The Police Gazette'' and served as an Army public affairs officer during World War I. An amateur history buff, he went on to a career in pulp magazines and screenplays, often using a Southern California backdrop for his stories. Many of his novels and stories were written under the pseudonyms Harrington Strong, Raley Brien, George Drayne, Monica Morton, Rowena Raley, Frederic Phelps, Walter Pierson, and John Mack Stone, among others. Aside from Zorro, McCulley created many other pulp characters, including Black Star, The Spider, The Mongoose, and Thubway Tham. Many of McCulley' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Karl May
Karl Friedrich May ( , ; 25 February 1842 – 30 March 1912) was a German author. He is best known for his novels of travels and adventures, set in the American Old West, the Orient, the Middle East, Latin America, China and Germany. He also wrote poetry, a play, and composed music. He was a proficient player of several musical instruments. Many of his works were adapted for film, theatre, audio dramas and comics. Later in his career, May turned to philosophical and spiritual genres. He is one of the best-selling German writers of all time, with about 200,000,000 copies sold worldwide. Early life May was the fifth child of a poor family of weavers in Ernstthal, Schönburgische Rezessherrschaften (then part of the Kingdom of Saxony). He had 13 siblings, of whom nine died in infancy. His parents were Heinrich August May and Wilhelmine Christiane Weise. During his school years, he received instruction in music and composition. At age twelve, May was making money at a s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pulp Magazines
Pulp magazines (also referred to as "the pulps") were inexpensive fiction magazines that were published from 1896 until around 1955. The term "pulp" derives from the wood pulp paper on which the magazines were printed, due to their cheap nature. In contrast, magazines printed on higher-quality paper were called "glossies" or "slicks". The typical pulp magazine had 128 pages; it was wide by high, and thick, with ragged, untrimmed edges. Pulps were the successors to the penny dreadfuls, dime novels, and short-fiction magazines of the 19th century. Although many respected writers wrote for pulps, the magazines were best known for their lurid, exploitative, and sensational subject matter, even though this was but a small part of what existed in the pulps. Digest magazines and men's adventure magazines were incorrectly regarded as pulps, though they have different editorial and production standards and are instead replacements. Modern superhero comic books are sometimes considered ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jesse James
Jesse Woodson James (September 5, 1847April 3, 1882) was an American outlaw, Bank robbery, bank and Train robbery, train robber, guerrilla and leader of the James–Younger Gang. Raised in the "Little Dixie (Missouri), Little Dixie" area of Missouri, James and his family maintained strong Southern United States, Southern sympathies. He and his brother Frank James joined pro-Confederate States of America, Confederate guerrillas known as "bushwhackers" operating in Missouri in the American Civil War, Missouri and Kansas in the American Civil War, Kansas during the American Civil War. As followers of William Quantrill and William T. Anderson, "Bloody Bill" Anderson, they were accused of committing atrocities against Union soldiers and civilian abolitionists, including the Centralia Massacre (Missouri), Centralia Massacre in 1864. After the war, as members of various List of Old West gangs, gangs of outlaws, Jesse and Frank robbed banks, stagecoaches, and trains across the Midwest ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wild Bill Hickok
James Butler Hickok (May 27, 1837August 2, 1876), better known as "Wild Bill" Hickok, was a folk hero of the American Old West known for his life on the frontier as a soldier, reconnaissance, scout, lawman, cattle rustler, gunslinger, gambler, showman, and actor, and for his involvement in many famous gunfighter, gunfights. He earned a great deal of notoriety in his own time, much of it bolstered by the many outlandish and often fabricated Tall tale, tales he told about himself. Some contemporaneous reports of his exploits are known to be fictitious, but they remain the basis of much of his fame and reputation. Hickok was born and raised on a farm in northern Illinois at a time when lawlessness and vigilante activity were rampant because of the influence of the "Banditti of the Prairie". Drawn to this criminal lifestyle, he headed west at age 18 as a fugitive from justice, working as a stagecoach driver and later as a lawman in the frontier territories of Kansas Territory, Kansas ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wyatt Earp
Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp (March 19, 1848 – January 13, 1929) was an American lawman in the American West, including Dodge City, Kansas, Dodge City, Wichita, Kansas, Wichita, and Tombstone, Arizona, Tombstone. Earp was involved in the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, during which he and some other lawmen killed three outlaw Cochise County Cowboys.Ward, Derrick S.; Wishart, David S. (editor)"Earp, Wyatt (1848-1929),"''Encyclopedia of the Great Plains,'' retrieved April 3, 2023 While Wyatt is often depicted as the key figure in the shootout, his brother Virgil Earp, Virgil was both Deputy U.S. Marshal and Tombstone City Marshal that day and had considerably more experience in law enforcement as a sheriff, constable, and marshal than did Wyatt. Virgil made the decision to enforce a Cochise County Cowboys#Weapon ordinance, city ordinance prohibiting carrying weapons in town and to disarm the Cowboys. Wyatt was only a temporary assistant marshal to his brother. In 1874, Earp arrived in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Buffalo Bill
William Frederick Cody (February 26, 1846January 10, 1917), better known as Buffalo Bill, was an American soldier, bison hunter, and showman. One of the most famous figures of the American Old West, Cody started his legend at the young age of 23. Shortly thereafter he started performing in shows that displayed cowboy themes and episodes from the frontier and Indian Wars. He founded ''Buffalo Bill's Wild West'' in 1883, taking his large company on tours in the United States and, beginning in 1887, in Europe. He was born in Le Claire, Iowa Territory (now the U.S. state of Iowa), but he lived for several years in his father's hometown in modern-day Mississauga, Ontario, before the family returned to the Midwest and settled in the Kansas Territory. Buffalo Bill started working at the age of 11, after his father's death, and became a rider for the Pony Express at age 15. During the American Civil War, he served the Union from 1863 to the end of the war in 1865. Later he se ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Billy The Kid
Henry McCarty (September 17 or November 23, 1859July 14, 1881), alias William H. Bonney, better known as Billy the Kid, was an American outlaw and gunfighter of the Old West who was linked to nine murders: four for which he was solely responsible, and five in which he may have played a role alongside others. He is also noted for his involvement in New Mexico's Lincoln County War. McCarty was orphaned at the age of 15. His first arrest was for stealing food at the age of 16 in 1875. Ten days later, he robbed a Chinese laundry and was arrested again but escaped shortly afterwards. He fled from New Mexico Territory into neighboring Arizona Territory, making himself both an outlaw and a federal fugitive. In 1877, he began to call himself "William H. Bonney". After killing a blacksmith during an altercation in August 1877, Bonney became a wanted man in Arizona and returned to New Mexico, where he joined a group of cattle rustlers. He became well known in the region when he ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
