Richard Slotkin

Richard Slotkin has established a reputation as one of the preeminent cultural critics and historians of our times. He is the Olin Professor of English and American Studies at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT. His award-winning trilogy on the myth of the frontier in America, which is comprised of Regeneration Through Violence, The Fatal Environment, and Gunfighter Nation offers an original and highly provocative interpretation of the United States' national experience. He has also published three historical novels: The Crater: A Novel of the Civil War, The Return of Henry Starr, and Abe: A Novel of the Young Lincoln. In his more than 25 years at Wesleyan, he has helped to establish both the American Studies and the Film Studies Programs. He offers interdisciplinary courses in American literature, history and film. In 1995 he received the Mary C Turpie Award of the American Studies Association for his contributions to teaching and program-building.

Regeneration Through Violence

In Regeneration through Violence, the first of his trilogy on the mythology of the American West, Richard Slotkin shows how the attitudes and traditions that shape American culture evolved from the social and psychological anxieties of European settlers struggling in a strange new world to claim the land and displace the Native Americans. Using the popular literature of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries - including captivity narratives, the Daniel Boone tales, and the writings of Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Melville - Slotkin traces the full development of this myth.

ISBN: 0806132299

The Fatal Environment

In The Fatal Environment, Richard Slotkin demonstrates how the myth of frontier expansion and subjugation of the Indians helped to justify the course of America's rise to wealth and power. Using Custer's Last Stand as a metaphor for what Americans feared might happen if the frontier should be closed and the "savage" element be permitted to dominate the "civilized," Slotkin shows the emergence by 1890 of a myth redefined to help Americans respond to the confusion and strife of industrialization and imperial expansion.

ISBN: 080613030X

Gunfighter Nation

The concluding volume of Richard Slotkin's highly acclaimed trilogy draws on a wide range of sources to examine the pervasive influence of Wild West myths on American culture and politics. In the third of a three-volume study in the development of the myth of the frontier in US literary, popular, and political culture from the colonial period to the present, Slotkin (English, Wesleyan U.) covers Theodore Roosevelt's and Frederick Jackson Turner's visions of the frontier, and the expression of the frontier myth in such popular culture phenomena as dime novels, Buffalo Bill's Wild West, the formula fiction of 1900-40, and the Hollywood film. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Abe: A Novel of the Young Lincoln

Famous Students

One of his most famous students is Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator, Joss Whedon.

Citied In

He has been citied by John Selton Lawrence and Robert Jewett in their text The Myth of the American Superhero; Bradforw W. Wright's Comic Book Nation: Transformation of a Youth Culture.