by the war, the types of fiction there have persisted longer than in the
South, where a new order of life, after a generation of clinging
memories, has moved toward popular heroes of a new variety.

The cowboy, for instance, legitimate successor to the miners and
gamblers of Bret Harte, might derive from almost any one of the states
and might range over prodigious areas; it is partly accident, of course,
that he stands out so sharply among the numerous conditions of men
produced by the new frontier. Except on very few occasions, as in Alfred
Henry Lewis's racy Wolfville stories and in Frederick Remington's vivid
pictures, in Andy Adams's more minute chronicle _The Log of a Cowboy_,
in Owen Wister's more sentimental _The Virginian_, and in O. Henry's
more diversified _Heart of the West_ and its fellows among his books,
the cowboy has regularly moved on the plane of the sub-literary--in dime
novels and, latterly, in moving pictures. He, like the mountaineer of
the South, has himself been largely inarticulate except for his rude
songs and ballads; formula and tradition caught him early and in
fiction stiffened one of the most picturesque of human beings--a modern
Centaur, an American Cossack, a Western picaro--into a stock figure who
in a stock costume perpetually sits a bucking broncho, brandishes a
six-shooter or swings a lariat, rounds up stampeding cattle, makes
fierce war on Mexicans, Indians, and rival outfits, and ardently, humbly
woos the ranchman's gentle daughter or the timorous school-ma'am. He
still has no Homer, no Gogol, no Fenimore Cooper even, though he invites
a master of some sort to take advantage of a thrilling opportunity.

The same fate of formula and tradition befell another type multiplied by
the local novelists--the bad boy. His career may be said to have begun
in New England, with Thomas Bailey Aldrich's reaction from the priggish
manikins who infested the older "juveniles"; but Mark Twain took him up