GUNFIGHTER NATION: Richard Slotkin Takes Aim At America’s Modern Myths Of Violence

In 1997, so long ago I still filed via fax, I was writing book reviews for the Financial Times’ Weekend paper, and the books editor asked me if I had a book to recommend for their “Re-Readings” feature. Although I personally wasn’t going to re-read it at this point; since (full disclosure) I had studied with Rich, I’d read the book more or less on publication just a few years earlier. But I thought it was a good opportunity for a literate audience to encounter Slotkin’s take of the frontier myths of America in the last, and most accessible of his trilogy of books which track from colonial days to the Twentieth Century.

It sat and sat for a long time until finally they killed it. It was too long, too American, too academic for their audience. I found the piece, buried in my documents file today, and decided it was time it finally got shared (you can see also my review on Slotkin’s more recent take on Trump and the election, A Great Disorder, in a piece on Medium titled The Last Cause: How Myth Defines and Divides America, or Where did Fu Manchu Go Wrong. Rich had included the book in our junior colloquiem, but when I sent him a copy of the essay, he didn’t remember that he had!

I tried suggesting Genoa, A Telling Of Wonders, by Paul Metcalf, to the FT. He’s a grandson of Herman…