Readers will "return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear" for an action-packed Western adventure tracing the legendary American cowboy. After a roundup of real lawmen and outlaws, the book takes aim at the cowboy kings of movies, radio and TV. We're back in the saddle again for a fun-filled lope into Western nostalgia from the 1920s to the 1960s. 284 illustrations; 50 in full color.

Roy Rogers' golden palomino, Trigger, was the perhaps the most famous horse in film--more popular than the man himself among certain fans. In its expanded second edition, this detailed look at the animals and men who created the legend of "the smartest horse in the movies" examines the life story of the original Trigger--and his doubles, particularly Little Trigger, the extraordinary trick horse. Movies in which Trigger appeared without Rogers are discussed. More than 200 photographs (90 new to this edition) and 30,000 words of additional material are included, covering unresolved aspects of Trigger's story, controversies surrounding the sale of the Roy Roger's Museum collection and the fate of his legacy.

Hoo-Doo Cowboys and Bronze Buckaroos undertakes an interdisciplinary exploration of the African American West through close readings of texts from a variety of media. This approach allows for both an in-depth analysis of individual texts and a discussion of material often left out or underrepresented in studies focused only on traditional literary material. The book engages heretofore unexamined writing by Rose Gordon, who wrote for local Montana newspapers rather than for a national audience; memoirs and letters of musicians, performers, and singers (such as W. C. Handy and Taylor Gordon), who lived in or wrote about touring the American West; the novels and films of Oscar Micheaux; black-cast westerns starring Herb Jeffries; largely unappreciated and unexamined episodes from the "golden age of western television" that feature African American actors; film and television westerns that use science fiction settings to imagine a "postracial" or "postsoul" frontier; Percival Everett's fiction addressing contemporary black western experience; and movies as recent as Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained. Despite recent interest in the history of the African American West, we know very little about how the African American past in the West has been depicted in a full range of imaginative forms. Hoo-Doo Cowboys and Bronze Buckaroos advances our discovery of how the African American West has been experienced, imagined, portrayed, and performed.

Shoot: the latest in Loren D. Estleman's Valentino mysteries! Valentino, a mild-manner film archivist at UCLA and sometime film detective, is at the closing party for the Red Montana and Dixie Day museum when he is approached by no less than his hero and man-of-the-hour Red Montana, western film and television star. Red tells Valentino that he is being blackmailed over the existence of a blue film that his wife, now known throughout the world as the wholesome Dixie Day and the other half of the Montana/Day power couple, made early in her career. With Dixie on her deathbed, Red is desperate to save her the embarrassment of the promised scandal, and offers Valentino a deal-find the movie, and he can have Red's lost film, Sixgun Sonata, that Red has been hiding away in his archives. Don't accept, and the priceless reel will go up in flames. Feeling blackmailed himself, Valentino agrees and begins to dig. In the surreal world of Hollywood, what is on screen is rarely reality. As he races to uncover the truth before time runs out, his heroes begin their fall from grace. Valentino desperately wants to save Sixgun Sonata...but at what cost?

The Slide Area is a monthly book review column by film historian Anthony Slide which has appeared in Classic Images since January 1989. This anthology collects over 300 reviews published in the column through December 1991. For each book, the reviewer provides bibliographic data, information as to content, and his own inimitable commentary, which combines both a thorough knowledge of the subject to hand and an understanding of each title's relative merit. Lillian Gish has called Slide "Our preeminent historian of the silent film era," and the Los Angeles Times has described him as a "one-man publishing phenomenon." This anthology will be useful both to librarians and to researchers in tracking down film and television books of the past three years, many of which have not been reviewed in library-oriented publications. Indexes.

By the time Stagecoach made John Wayne a silver-screen star in 1939, the thirty-one-year-old was already a veteran of more than sixty films, having twirled six-guns and foiled cattle rustlers in B Westerns for five studios. By the 1950s he was Hollywood’s most popular actor—an Academy Award nominee destined to become an American icon. This biography reveals the story of his early life, illustrated with rare archival images.