SOURCE: "Sex on the Lone Prairee," in Western American Literature, Vol. XIII, No. 1 Spring, 1978, pp. 15-33.

In the following essay, Sonnichsen presents an overview of sex in novels of the American West.

Western fiction has traditionally been clean. Where the coyotes howl and the wind blows free was never a place for promiscuous sex, kinky sex, or perversion. Since the early sixties, however, all this has changed. Western novelists have not gone as far out on the pornographic limb as some of their counterparts in the East and in California, but they have done their best and are still doing it in the late seventies, although there are signs that the urge to show all and tell all is slowing down—in the Great Open Spaces as well as nationally.

Sex has always been a commodity and sometimes a literary commodity, and its appearance in works of fiction...