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Bloomsbury USA
February 2013
On Sale: February 19, 2013
416 pages
ISBN: 1608191052
EAN: 9781608191055
Kindle: B009SJZI60
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
In 1836 in East Texas, nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker was
kidnapped by Comanches. She was raised by the tribe and
eventually became the wife of a warrior. Twenty-four years
after her capture, she was reclaimed by the U.S. cavalry and
Texas Rangers and restored to her white family, to die in
misery and obscurity. Cynthia Ann's story has been told and
re-told over generations to become a foundational American
tale. The myth gave rise to operas and one-act plays, and in
the 1950s to a novel by Alan LeMay, which would be adapted
into one of Hollywood's most legendary films, The Searchers,
"The Biggest, Roughest, Toughest... and Most Beautiful
Picture Ever Made!" directed by John Ford and starring John
Wayne. Glenn Frankel, beginning in Hollywood and then returning to
the origins of the story, creates a rich and nuanced anatomy
of a timeless film and a quintessentially American myth. The
dominant story that has emerged departs dramatically from
documented history: it is of the inevitable triumph of white
civilization, underpinned by anxiety about the sullying of
white women by "savages." What makes John Ford's film so
powerful, and so important, Frankel argues, is that it both
upholds that myth and undermines it, baring the ambiguities
surrounding race, sexuality, and violence in the settling of
the West and the making of America.
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