The West as a main subject in contemporary american short-story writing

Resumen

Thinking West is what Americans mainly do. It is a way of life, a code of behavior, and it implies a whole set of values deeply engraved in the minds of the citizens. This is the true history of the United States, the one experience which sets them apart from the rest of the world. Concepts like individuality, tenacity and a totally unsophisticated respond to life come from endurance in close contact with danger and the unknown, their experience at the frontier. It is the American version to the European principles of Romanticism with Emerson and Thoreau as main figures. It implies an ideology that has been acted out for three centuries and has proved valuable to the present day. It is not only the mass media, not only the popular literature of the West which transmits the idea, but contemporary literature as a whole. Short-story writing, being more conceptual, shows the issue as a conflict of opposites.