A New Take On Old West Lit

The Five Most Important Frontier Novels

By James Work, Guest Writer, 3-25-11

The first thing we do, let’s clarify “frontier.” For early Europeans in America it was what Frederick Jackson Turner called “the hither edge of free land.” (“Free” if you took it from the savages who thought it was theirs.) The struggle against the savage land re-energized the European and invigorated Americans.

Which is why John F. Kennedy called for a New Frontier in 1960 and Gene Roddenberry called outer space the Final Frontier in 1966. Conquering frontiers keeps the American soul from stagnating.

In 1782 J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur called Orange Country, N.Y. the frontier. In 1823 James Fenimore Cooper moved the frontier eighty miles west to the Susquehanna River in The Pioneers. In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner theorized that the actual American frontier was wherever civilized custom ran headlong into savage necessities. At that point, he postulated, Americans were made.

“The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization,” Turner wrote. The Europeans arrive with their civilized customs, habits, ways of thinking; the wilderness forces them to revert to primitive methods. Gradually they re-establish civilized living, but it is not European. It has changed into something called American.

The Western Literature Association surveyed more than two hundred scholars, teachers and writers. Each was asked to list the ten most important works in Western American literature. The five frontier novels most frequently listed are Willa Cather’s O Pioneers (1913), Willa Cather’s My Antonia (1918), O.E. Rölvaag’s Giants in the Earth (1927), John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath (1939), and Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose (1971).

O Pioneers epitomizes Americanization. Old John Bergson moved from Sweden to Nebraska and for “eleven long years” tried to tame the land. As he lies dying, he surrenders the land not to one of his sons in the old European way but to his daughter Alexandra. She has been reading books and pamphlets about farming. She has new ideas about it. She is intelligent and independent, so her brothers and neighbors believe she is doomed to failure. Even Alexandra’s mother is against newness. “Habit was very strong with Mrs. Bergson,” who misses the old ways.

Alexandra defies European tradition. Despite being a woman she takes on a mortgage and acquires acreage. She will not be wooed like a peasant, but bides her time and chooses her own husband. When she has endured and prospered, when she could live like a proper Swedish woman of wealth, she is content to be an American farmer. She tells Carl, “You remember what you once said about the graveyard, and the old story writing itself over? Only it is we who write it, with the best we have.”

Again in My Antonia, Cather recognizes the land’s role in Americanization. The boy Jim Burden sees Nebraska as a wilderness. “There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.” However, the Germans and Czechs and Swedes meet the land on its own terms; when Burden sees it again years later it is a place of orchards and villages and fields of wheat and corn. “The changes seemed beautiful and harmonious to me; it was like watching the growth of a great man or of a great idea.”

Like Alexandra, Antonia perseveres and re-establishes a civilized life, but not a European style life. “It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight,” Burden writes. “She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.”

And if “founders of races” ain’t a segue into Giants in the Earth I don’t know what is. In Rölvaag’s novel Per Hansa is the first to break the land, first to sell potatoes, first to acquire a horse from the Indians, first to sire a son, first to breed chickens. He turns away from the old Norwegian religion, which he sees as stagnant. The Dakota prairie offers nothing with which to build a Norwegian-style house, so he builds one of sod.

“The human race has not known such faith and such self-confidence since history began,” wrote Rölvaag, “and so had been the Spirit since the day the first settlers landed on the eastern shores.”

Which gives me another sneaky seque, into Grapes of Wrath. Here is a group of people who by all rights SHOULD have the self-confidence of a dead turtle on the interstate. They have been pushed off the land, exploited, murdered, cheated and starved. But rather than subscribe to the European Peasant Plan and submit to the feudal yoke, first Jim Casey and then Tom Joad organize a workers union. For a moment they succumb to necessary savagery—then rise up as free Americans.

Speaking of free, the narrator in Stegner’s Angle of Repose is not only a prisoner of his crippled body, he’s a prisoner of his family history. He recognizes that his grandfather once “had everything he had come West looking for—the freedom, the outdoor life, the excitement of something mighty to be built.”

Grandfather’s wife, however, was a prisoner of silence and loneliness in the West, like the wife of Per Hansa in Giants in the Earth. She was from the East and was an artist. The land frightened Susan and she could not find her compromise with the frontier’s savage conditions. Her longing for “the grace and order of a way of life” she had known in New York becomes her downfall.

According to Turner the characteristics that make us Americans—inventiveness, curiosity, “restless nervous energy” lacking in the artistic “but powerful to achieve great ends”—resulted from the existence of a frontier. That theme ties these five novels together. But before you rush to buy them, you should know that O Pioneers has been banned because it contains adultery as well as forgiveness of murder; Giants in the Earth has a suicide and a woman driven insane by the empty land; Grapes of Wrath smacks of socialism and has that awful final scene of the young woman nursing the dying man—literally—and Angle of Repose came under savage attack for allowing the female character an adultery and possible lesbian relationship. 

Nevertheless, those are the top five in the survey. Someday I may tell you about the remaining fifteen.

Dr. James Work is the editor of the textbook Prose and Poetry of the American West, past-president of the Western Literature Association, and author of eight novels set in the West.

More articles in this series:

• The Five Most Important Works of Mountain Man Fiction by James Work

• “The Five Most Important Cowboy Novels Ever” by James Work

• Western Writing and Stereotype: Eastern Novels Go Inward, Western Novels Go Outward by James Work

• Sentimental Cowpunchers, Homesteader’s Gramophone: Three Classic Western Christmas Stories by James Work

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