Hopalong Cassidy

Mulford, Clarence Edward, 1883-1956Project Gutenberg · United StatesMar 2023

Rating 3.8
Word count
500K words
Chapters
51

Tags

Motivation and Growth Interpersonal CommunicationSocial EtiquetteWorkplace RelationsInterpersonal WisdomLetter-Writing ModelPractical GuideArt of WordingCase Analysis19th CenturyBritish Manners

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971, and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today. Hopalong Cassidy by Clarence Edward Mulford. Author: Mulford, Clarence Edward, 1883-1956. Language: English. Class: PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature. Release Date: Dec 6, 2011

Editor's review

This book is an important early work that shaped the character Hopalong Cassidy in Western fiction. Against a gritty frontier backdrop, Mulford writes of cowboys' labor, conflicts, and comradeship, interweaving action scenes with everyday detail in a brisk rhythm. As a Project Gutenberg public-domain eBook, it gives readers low-cost access to the Western genre in the history of American popular literature and serves as a sample of early twentieth-century popular reading tastes. The language carries period colloquialisms and dialect, and in reading one can feel the narrative habits of genre fiction: vivid characters, clear-cut good and evil, and direct plotting. It is better read as a historical source for genre literature and popular culture than as a work pursuing complex psychology or modern narrative technique; readers interested in Western films and the cowboy image can see here the character prototype on which later screen adaptations drew.

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Reading tips

  1. Read the opening chapters first to get familiar with the character relationships and the rhythm of the language, then move steadily through the main plot.
  2. Excerpt dialect and colloquial expressions separately; guess meaning from context before checking.
  3. After finishing, watch an early Western film and compare how the character image continues.
  4. Take notes from a genre-literature perspective, recording common patterns in conflict setup and character function.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48
  49. 49
  50. 50
  51. 51

FAQ

I've never read a Western novel. Can I start with this one? Yes. It is an introductory sample of genre fiction, with direct plotting and clear character functions, and it does not rely on prior knowledge. But the language carries period colloquialisms and dialect, so it is best to read a chapter or two first to get used to the rhythm; do not puzzle over every word in difficult sentences—just grasp the action and character relationships.
Is this book closely related to the later film and television versions of Hopalong Cassidy? The book provides the character's early literary image, on which screen adaptations made popular adjustments. Readers can treat it as the prototype text and observe which traits were kept and which were rewritten, but they should not map novel plot points one-to-one onto screen plots.
How difficult is it as English extensive reading material? It is moderately advanced. Sentences are not complex, but dialect spellings, old-fashioned colloquialisms, and action description add to the difficulty. It suits readers with some English foundation who are willing to tolerate unfamiliar words; it is best to proceed chapter by chapter without looking up every word, so as to maintain reading continuity.

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About the author

Mulford, Clarence Edward, 1883-1956 Author

Clarence Edward Mulford (1883-1956) was an American writer of Western fiction, best known for creating the cowboy character Hopalong Cassidy. The library holds eight of his works, including Hopalong Cassidy, Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up Or, Bar-20, Bar-20 Days, Bring Me His Ears, The Man from Bar 20: A Story of the Cow Country, The Orphan, The Bar-20 Three, and Johnny Nelson; they are commonly classified under inspirational growth. These works mostly center on ranch life and cowboys in the American West, with tight plots, hearty characters, and a spirit of adventure and personal growth. Public information about his life is limited, but the surviving works show that he built stories around a recurring cast and a connected Western setting, and that he had some influence on later popular Western literature and screen adaptations.