{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.019024970273483946, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0005945303210463733, 'mean_word_length': 5.053956834532374, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
The Big Sky and the Limits Of Wilderness Fiction

A decade ago, John Milton, Editor of the South Dakota Review, conducted a symposium on the Western novel in which he asked such accomplished Western writers as Frank Waters, Frederick Manfred, Walter Van Tilburg Clark and Vardis Fisher whether the subject matter and/or regional setting of Western fiction poses any special problems for the Western novelist. Some of the answers Milton received were to be expected: that Eastern and urban critics cannot understand Western and non-urban fiction and so treat it lightly or ignore it altogether, and that the formula Western has undermined serious Western writing and has made it a little suspect with sophisticated readers and critics. But the most important response to the question from these writers was that in those historical novels which record the great conflicts between civilization and wilderness, between primitivism and progress, there is simply no room for the kind of thorough-going exploration of the inward aspects of human personality through which complete char­ acterizations are generally achieved. As novelist Michael Straight has observed about the characters in his own writing, “I could not spend much of my time hidden under their beds.”1 Frederick Manfred has pointed to the importance of setting in Western fiction by insisting that “it’s place that writes your books.”" And Manfred is, of course, correct to a point. But even a cursory glance at the classics of British and American fiction reminds one that great novels are not written about places, but about people; that as Frank Waters so succinctly notes, “characterization is the test of all novels