Flicka and Friends: Stories of Horses and of Boys Who Loved Them

Abstract

For Henry Larom, Rutherford Montgomery, and Mary O’Hara, in constructing stories about boys coming-of-age with significant horse companions in the American West in the 1940s and 1950s they turned to the Western as their structural model. To some degree, all three utilized Western conventions, but as the writers move further from this model, most specifically eschewing gun violence as an indicator of heroism, the cowboy’s “other” standard appurtenance, the horse, becomes progressively more significant. The horse, ultimately, is a bridge between the Western and the coming-of-age tale, helping to create a new form of children’s fiction from the two genres in which the books participate.