PROBABLY SOMEWHERE IN OUR FIFTY STATES, possibly in several of them, there is a course taught in American Literature of the Westward Movement. Though I have sifted scores of college catalogs, I have found no such course but my own; and since I am convinced that it yields a set of valuable literary experiences giving bottom and imaginative immediacy to possibly the most pervasive and far-reaching phase of the American heritage, I feel warranted in offering an account of it. The course was suggested to me some five years ago by my department head, John T. Frederick, now retired. Once it was suggested, the potentialities became quickly evident. The literature would, of necessity, be primarily historical and it would be predominantly fiction, even though there was some relevant poetry and a fair amount of non-fiction prose. American writers may not have produced a Henry Esmond, but there were the Leatherstocking Tales, The Great Meadow, Roughing It, My Antonia, A Son of the Middle Border, Northwest Passage, and Giants in the Earth as nuclei. And there was mighty good company in considerable numbers for that cluster.

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