Genres
Western
Fiction set on the American frontier of the Old West, built around cowboys, lawmen and frontier justice.
The Western is a genre of fiction typically set on the American frontier, the Old West or Wild West, most often during 19th-century westward expansion. Its stock figures are cowboys, gunslingers, drifters and lawmen following personal codes of honor and frontier justice; its stock plots run crime, pursuit and retribution, often resolved by shootout or quick-draw duel, across deserts, mountains, ranches and saloons. Owen Wister's The Virginian (1902) was the first critically recognized Western novel, and Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour are the shelf's major fiction writers.
The frontier is a portable template: sparse authority, immediate consequences and a drifting cast. It travels well; space opera was named by analogy to the Western "horse opera".