ABSTRACT
One can speculate on why a young writer would give up a novel based at least in part on personal experience for one which was purely imaginative. After all, Doctorow had been a college student but he had never been out West. But a major stimulant, aside from the liberating feeling of working strictly from imagination, may have been provided by the popular genre itself. In choosing the Western genre, Doctorow was already beginning his revisioning of American history. Indeed, the West was an appropriate place to begin because of its central place in our understanding of America’s development. From Crèvecoeur to Frederick Jackson Turner, observers have pointed to the significance of the frontier in shaping a specifically American character. The Western may take many forms but it adheres to a single formula. Both plot and place are unchanging elements in a fixed formulation.
