The crowded prairie

This fresh, stimulating book employs the Western as a vital medium for examining the many tensions&mdashpolitical, racial, sexual, social and religious&mdashwhich have beset modern America from "Stagecoach" and the Depression's last years to the decline of the genre in the 1970s. Michael Coyne focuses on a group of great Westerns, showing how they engaged covertly with such thorny issues as miscegenation, labor-management relations, generational discord, codes of masculinity, the Cold War, McCarthyism, Vietnam, and the increasing individual social alienation.