The Wire Cutters by Mollie E. Moore Davis Introduction by Lou Halsell Rodenberger

Predating both Owen Wister's The Virginian and Andy Adams's Log of a Cowboy, Mollie E. Moore Davis's novel The Wire Cutters was the vanguard of a new American genre: the Western.

Published in 1899, The Wire Cutters was the first novel to offer a serious portrayal of nineteenth-century cowboy life. Inspired by the Fence Cutting Wars, a destructive competition among Texas ranchers to gain access to water for their herds, The Wire Cutters recreates the colorful vernacular and personalities of the cowboys, the folk culture of the region, and daily life on the Western frontier.

Considered among the best of the region's early fiction writers, Davis spent time as a writer and newspaperwoman in Texas and Louisiana, using both states as settings for her stories. Her body of work demonstrates the movement away from romantic conventions toward a storytelling that relied more heavily on realism. Davis's Texas-based novels in particular reveal a writer whose sharp ear for regional dialect, abundant sense of frontier humor, and keen grasp of historical detail drive a narrative that is grounded in observable and shared experience.

Now, with a foreword by Lou Halsell Rodenberger which delineates the historical and literary significance of this important but forgotten novel, The Wire Cutters is available to scholars and aficionados of Westerns and Texana for the first time since its initial publication.

Moved from Alabama to San Marcos, Texas, as a child, MOLLIE E. MOORE DAVIS (1847?–1909) began her career as a newspaperwoman in Tyler, Houston, and Galveston. After marrying, she moved to New Orleans and began her work as a novelist, returning in the summers to Comanche, Texas, where she gathered the material for The Wire Cutters.

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The Wire Cutters
0-89096-796-2 paper $16.95

LC 97-33380. 5x7 1/2. 400 pp.
Western Writing and Criticism. Texana. Fiction.

Publication Date: October 1997.

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