The Western has been the favorite type for American adventure story since the nineteenth century. While the American West was being settled, newspapers and "dime novels" could depend on stories of the frontier settlements and tell tales about living in the untamed wilderness to sell. The public back East was eager to read about the West, even if the stories were more fiction than fact.
In 1902, Owen Wister published his novel The Virginian, which was one of the first novels to treat the Western as a serious literary form; the novel still sold well and had inspired several movies and a television series. In 1905, Bertha H. Bower and Zane Grey published their first novels, and the popular Western novels had continued to flourish from that day on, with current novels by Luke Short, Max Brand, and Louis L’ Amour carrying on the tradition.
The first Western movie appeared even earlier than these serious Western novels. Before the turn of the century, an associate of Edison’s had filmed Cripple Creek Barroom Scene, a few seconds of film showing the inside of a saloon, to help publicize the invention of the movie camera. In 1903 the Edison’ company filmed the first "full-length" Western — The Great Train Robbery. The film lasts less than fifteen minutes, but a story is told its entirety. In the movie, bandits (强盗) rob a train and its passengers, killing the engineer, and find themselves tracked down by a posse. Audiences loved the movie. Some theaters were actually opened for the single purpose of showing The Great Train Robbery and only later realized that they could do equally well showing other movies. The film was so successful that other companies, and finally even the Edison company itself, began producing copies and other versions of The Great Train Robbery. Ironically, in" an era when the West was still very real —-Arizona, New Mexico and Oklahoma were all territories rather than states in 1903 — The Great Train Robbery was filmed in New Jersey.
9. The purpose of this passage is to________.
A. discuss the making of the movie The Great Train Robbery
B. discuss the early Western novels
C. discuss the art of movie making
D. trace the development of the Western as an American adventure story tradition
10. We can conclude from this passage that________.
A. people lost interest in the West after 1903
B. Owen Wister was an ex-cowboy
C. New Jersey was still "untamed wilderness" in 1903
D. films were fairly uncommon at the time The Great Train Robbery was made
11. The passage suggests that________.
A. Edison’s invention of the movie camera happened;by accident
B. movie houses didn’t make much-money in the early days
C. Easterners were fascinated by the " wild West"
D. The Great Train Robbery was poorly received by the public because it lacked a plot
12. As used in this passage, the word “literary” means________.
A. humorous B. financial C. appropriate to literature D. amateur
