"The thing to remember about this appetite for Westerns and the West is that millions who possess it are entirely
uncritical. They’ll take anything in buckskins, literally. The Karl May
cult in Germany has not even begun to slow down, although May died in
1912 and was himself never west of Buffalo. Indeed, as I discovered with
Lonesome Dove, it is really impossible to get people to look at
the West critically - they just refuse. The director John Ford is said
to have decreed that if you have to choose between the truth and the
legend, print the legend. From my experience I’d say that there’s really
no choice: for most readers and viewers it’s the legend or nothing."
Larry McMurtry
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