The Western is an American genre in literature and film. Westerns are art works – films, literature, television and radio shows, sculpture (particularly that by Frederic Remington), and paintings – devoted to telling stories set in the 19th Century American West (and sometimes Mexico, Canada or the Australian Outback, during the same time period), with the setting occasionally portrayed in a romanticised light.
While the Western has been popular throughout the history of movies, it has decreased in prominence since the late 1970s.

Western fiction got its start in the "penny dreadfuls" and later the "dime novels" (see also Dime Western) that first began to be published in the mid-nineteenth century. These cheap books were published to capitalise on the many fanciful yet supposedly true stories that were being told about the mountain men, outlaws, settlers and lawmen taming the western frontier. By 1900, the new medium of pulp magazines helped to relate these adventures to easterners. Meanwhile, non-American authors like the German Karl May picked up the genre, went to full novel length, and made it hugely popular and successful in continental Europe from about 1880 on, though they were generally dismissed as trivial by the literary critics of the day.

The Virginian, published 1902, is considered by many to be the pioneering "literary" western novel, containing the core element of a rugged individual who stick to his guns in the face of trouble, neglecting chances to simply walk away. This seeming bundle of cliches was fresh and hugely popular in 1902, and elements of this formula appear in most Western stories ever since.


Popularity grew with the publication of Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage in 1912. When pulp magazines exploded in popularity in the 1920s, western fiction greatly benefited (as did the author Max Brand, who excelled at the western short story). The simultaneous popularity of Western movies in the 1920s also helped the genre.

In the 1940s several seminal westerns were published including The Ox-Bow Incident (1940) by Walter van Tilburg Clark, The Big Sky (1947) and The Way West (1949) by A.B. Guthrie, Jr., and Shane (1949) by Jack Schaefer. Many other western authors gained readership in the 1950s, such as Luke Short, Ray Hogan, and Louis L'Amour. The genre peaked around the early 1960s, largely due to the tremendous number of westerns on television. In the 1970s, the work of Louis L'Amour began to catch hold of most western readers and he has tended to dominate the western reader lists ever since. George G. Gilman maintained a cult following for several years in the 1970s and 1980s. Readership as a whole began to drop off in the mid- to late '70s and has reached a new low today, and most bookstores, outside of a few western states, only carry a small number of Western fiction books. Nevertheless, several Western fiction series are published monthly, such as The Trailsman, Slocum, and Longarm. Western authors have an organisation that represents them called the Western Writers of America, who present the annual Golden Spur Awards.

A genre in which description and dialogue are lean, and the landscape spectacular, is well suited to film. Early Westerns were mostly filmed in the studio like other early Hollywood movies, but when locations shooting became more common, producers of Westerns used desolate corners of California, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, Kansas, Texas, Colorado or Wyoming, often making the landscape not just a vivid backdrop, but a character in the movie. Productions were also filmed on location at movie ranches.

The Western genre itself has sub-genres, such as the epic Western, the shoot 'em up, singing cowboy Westerns, and a few comedy Westerns. The Western re-invented itself in the revisionist Western.

Cowboys and Gunslingers play prominent roles in Western movies. Often fights with Native Americans are depicted. In early Westerns, the "Injuns" are frequently portrayed as dishonorable villains; however, many "revisionist" Westerns give the natives more sympathetic treatment. Other recurring themes of westerns include western treks and groups of bandits terrorising small towns such as in The Magnificent Seven.

Main article: Spaghetti Western

Many Westerns after 1960 were heavily influenced by the Japanese samurai films of Akira Kurosawa. For instance The Magnificent Seven was a remake of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, and both A Fistful of Dollars and Last Man Standing were remakes of Kurosawa's Yojimbo, which itself was inspired by Red Harvest, an American detective novel by Dashiell Hammett. It should also be noted that Kurosawa himself was heavily influenced from American Westerns, especially the works of John Ford. Senses of Cinema

Despite the Cold War, the western was a strong influence on Eastern Bloc cinema, which had its own take on the genre, the so called 'Red Western' or Ostern. Generally these took two forms: either straight westerns shot in the Eastern Bloc, or action films involving the Russian Revolution and civil war and the Basmachi rebellion in which Turkic peoples play a similar role to Mexicans in traditional westerns.

An offshoot of the western genre is the "post-apocalyptic" western, in which a future society, struggling to rebuild after a major catastrophe, is portrayed in a manner very similar to the 19th century frontier. Examples include The Postman and the Mad Max series, and the computer game series Fallout.

Many elements of space travel series and films borrow extensively from the conventions of the western genre. Peter Hyams' Outland transferred the plot of High Noon to interstellar space. Gene Roddenberry, the creator of the Star Trek series, once described his vision for the show as "Wagon Train to the stars". More recently, the space opera series Firefly used an explicitly western theme for its portrayal of frontier worlds. Anime shows like Cowboy Bebop, Trigun and Outlaw Star have been similar mixes of science fiction and Western elements. The science fiction Western can be seen as a subgenre of either Westerns or science fiction.

Elements of western movies can be found also in some movies belonging essentially to other genres. For example, Kelly's Heroes is a war movie, but action and characters are western-like. The British film Zulu set during the Anglo-Zulu War has sometimes been compared to a Western, even though it is set in South Africa.

The character played by Humphrey Bogart in such films as Casablanca, To Have and Have Not or The Treasure of the Sierra Madre - an individual fighter bound only by his own private code of honour - has, whatever the film's setting, a lot in common with the classic western hero despite being classic noir films. In turn, the western, which has been so influential on noir film, has progressed back into noir, as with the film Sugar Creek, which combines classic elements of both noir and western films.

In many of Robert A. Heinlein's books, the settlement of other planets is depicted in ways explicitly modeled on American settlement of the West. For example, in his Tunnel in the Sky settlers set out to the planet "New Cannan", via an interstellar teleporter portal across the galaxy, in conestoga wagons, their captain sporting moustaches and a little goatee and riding a Palomino horse - with Heinlein explaining that the colonists would need to survive on their own for some years, so horses are more practical than machines.

Stephen King's The Dark Tower is a series of seven books that meshes themes of westerns, high fantasy, science fiction and horror. The protagonist Roland Deschain is a gunslinger whose image and personality are largely inspired by the Man with No Name from Sergio Leone's films.

In addition, the superhero fantasy genre has been described as having been derived from the cowboy hero, only powered up to omnipotence in a primarily urban setting.

The western genre has been parodied on a number of occasions, famous examples being Support Your Local Sheriff, Cat Ballou, Mel Brooks's Blazing Saddles, and Rustler's Rhapsody.

George Lucas's Star Wars films use many elements of a western, and indeed, Lucas has said he intended for Star Wars to revitalise cinematic mythology, a part the western once held. The Jedi, who take their name from Jidaigeki, are modeled after samurai, showing the influence of Kurosawa. The character Han Solo dressed like an archetypal gunslinger, and the Mos Eisley Cantina is much like an old west saloon.

See also: Weird West