Wild West eMonday - The Western

"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