passed his jailhouse days by inventing ancowboy hero named “Old Shatterhand”nand his noble Indian companionnWinnetou. May had never seennAmerica, but he wrote 15 hugely popularnnovels in the 1860’s and 70’snwherein civilization — more exactly,nGerman civilization — overcame savagerynin a mythical West that resemblesnthe unnamed isle of Shakespeare’s ThenTempest, itself one of the first works innEuropean literature to be set in thenAmericas. May’s novels continue tonsell, and they propel German touristsnto visit the American West by thenhundreds of thousands each year.nHad May ever seen the places henwrote about, he likely would not havenchanged a word. Zane Grey (1872-n1939), an Ohio dentist who moved tonArizona in 1907 to take up a newncareer as a writer, traveled the Westnendlessly to capture the social andnnatural detail that provides local color,nbut his most famous novels — Riders ofnthe Purple Sage, The Call of the Canyon,nWanderer of the Wasteland, likenhis forty-odd other adventure stories —nare no more authentic than May’s,nexcept in incidentals of the local dialect.nNeither are those of his famousnsuccessor Louis L’Amour, whosenvaunted research did not save him fromnperpetuating the same genre-lockednromantic myths of black-spittled outlawsnand lone noble heroes. HisnSackett saga, a multivolume mass ofnsloppy cliche, might as easily be set innthe highlands of Scotland or the Kalaharinfor all the historical truths it advances.nMax Brand, Max Evans, TerrynJohnston, Jim Miller, Bill Reno — thenpulp-romance tradition continues,nurged along by a constant readership.nLike the vast run of bodice-ripperngothic and science-fiction novels,nwhich share many other similaritiesnwith Westerns, their books are massproducednand interchangeable, the literarynequivalent of the barbed-wirenstrand or the Colt revolver. In theirnflood, books that speak to the realnWest, that takes the region as somethingnother than a vermilion-and-ochrenbackdrop, drown unnoticed: J.P.S.nBrown’s The Forests of the Night,nCharles McNichols’ Crazy Weather,nJames Welch’s Fool’s Crow, and, perhapsnthe greatest novel ever set west ofnthe Hundredth Meridian, CormacnMcCarthy’s Blood Meridian, to namenbut a few.nHollywood’s voracious appetite fornformulaic stories doesn’t help matters.nEvelyn Waugh hit the mark when henobserved, “Each book purchased fornmotion pictures has some individualnquality, good or bad, that has made itnremarkable. It is the work of a greatnarray of highly paid and incompatiblenwriters to distinguish the quality, separatenit, and obliterate it.” Why writenauthentically when Dances WithnWolves, the most nakedly cynical lonegood-guy-against-the-woridnoater of recentnyears, is the hit of the day? Fornevery historically and culturally faithfulnlook at the West — and in this regardnRoman Polanski’s Chinatown, DonnSiegel’s The Shootist, and JonathannWacks’ Powwow Highway earn topnmarks — there are a dozen spaghettinWesterns, Sam Peckinpah shoot-emups,nand mediocrities along the lines ofnLittle Big Man, Butch Cassidy and thenSundance Kid, and The MissourinBreaks. There is little hope for improvementnin an industry where thensqueaky-clean Marie Osmond is cast asnJosephine Marcus, Wyatt Earp’s pros­ntitute wife, and the constantiy muggingnEmilio Estevez is thought to make ansuitable Billy the Kid. It appears thatnwe’ll have to make do with BlazingnSaddles, and wonder when ArnoldnSchwarzenegger will take on the rolenof George Armstrong Custer.nNeither does it help that, in thenmain, academia continues to relegatenboth Western history and Western literaturento the infra-dig confines of thenoverview course. As a geographicalnliterature, writing about the AmericannWest comprises an area as large asnEurope — but no sensible teachernwould ever think to offer a surveynembracing Homer, Petrarch, KnutnHamsun, Alain Robbe-Grillet, ThomasnMann, and the guslars of Macedonianwith any hope of intelligible discovery.nNevertheless, it is not uncommonnto hear of courses that take in MarknTwain, Mary Austin, Willa Gather,nRobinson Jeffers, Ivan Doig, FranknNorris, Richard Hugo, Wright Morris,nand N. Scott Momaday on the merengrounds of their supposed geographicalnproximity. Had Robert Frost remainednin the city of his youth, San Francisco,nand Mary McCarthy in Seattle, theynTHE MYTHS OF ANTITRUSTnAititmstnand—rn. AiiiilminTdf,! JnMil] )iiiliircn.Dmiiitiick I. •nArwei/tai/onINDEPENDENTnINSTITUTEnA thoroughly documented indictmentnof U.S. antitrust policy, Antitrust andnMonopoly draws on all the classicnantitrust cases in history to illustratenthat the laws have not been employednagainst monopolies, but have been usedninstead to restrain competition.n”The single best book on this vital public policynissue, and it should become a, if not thenstandard work in economics, history, andnpolitical science.”n—PUBLIC CHOICEn”Skillfully honed, eloquent, Armentano’s booknmust be mastered by all who would be heard onnthis issue.”n—BUSINESS HISTORY REVIEWn”This book should be on the required readingnlist of every course in antitrust in law schools,nbusiness schools, and departments ofneconomics.”n—DONALD DEWEYnProfessor of EconomicsnColumbia Universityn6 Figures • 4 Tables • Index • 306 pages, Paperback, Item #4003n$19.95 plus postage ($2.00 per book; CA residents add Sales Tax)nORDER TOLL FREE 1-800-927-8733nAvailable at better bookstores or order by Credit card orders onlj. 24 hours a day.nmail and receive the complete catalog: —nThe Independent Institute, Dept. AA2,134 Ninety-Eighth Avenue, Oaltland, CA 94603nnnNOVEMBER 1991/47n