John Wayne's America

Cover Art for 9780684808239, John Wayne's America by Garry Wills
ISBN: 9780684808239
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 10 March, 1997
Format: Hardcover
Links Australian Libraries (Trove)
Editions:
3 other editions of this product

This book poses an interesting question: How is it that John Wayne came to embody a certain politics for America? In giving his answer, Wills flashes his usual encyclopedic knowledge of intellectual and cultural materials. He knows his Aristotle and his Groucho and knows when to use them. The knee-jerk analysis of Wayne's status is that he was a blustery flag-waver. Wills's answer is more subtle: that Wayne "stood for an America that was disappearing or had disappeared." And according to Wills, Wayne did this in different ways at different stages of his career. In his early successes (such as Stagecoach), he represented naive virtue; later he would portray the dark acceptance of responsibility (Sands of Iwo Jima). And finally, he moved on to model a conscious acceptance of the anachronism of all such individual honor (The Shootist).

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