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Jane Kramer, The Last Cowboy (Harper and Row, 1978) Veteran New Yorker European correspondent Kramer spent a year in the Texas Panhandle to document the life of her last cowboy, a man she calls Hank Blanton, an obstinate, down-on-his-luck ranch foreman who in his diehard belief in the myth of the American west ("a landscape of Manichaean possibilities") and self-conscious carousing confirms not only that the frontier is dead but that in many ways it never existed. Blanton believed in a West, writes Kramer, "as sentimental and as brutal as the people who made a virtue of that curious combination of qualities and called it the American experience." Larry L. King writes in the New York Times Book Review, "Henry Blanton's political and sociological notions are such as to make him close to a cartoon of the type: anti-union, anti-black, anti-welfare, anti-gun control and general government meddling. Henry wants to believe in an America where the rugged individualist still can go it alone, even though his daily struggles offer much evidence to the contrary. Sometimes you want to grab ol' Henry and knock a little sense into his noggin and say 'Come on, Hank, dammit now, the last horseman has passed by and the range is all fenced. Get off your romantic high horse. You're not a soul riding free but a spirit hogtied by mortgages, bossmen, piano lessons for the kids and the cost of groceries—just like your city cousins...' Yet there is a certain charm in Henry Blanton's bluster and his stubborn belief in old values. You admire it, the way you might admire a small boy who refuses to eat his oatmeal on the grounds that he don't want no damned oatmeal." The New York Times Book Review, January 22, 1978, page 11 MORE: Short bio of Kramer on American Academy in Berlin web site |
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