American · b. 1942
Richard Slotkin spent his career explaining why Americans tell the story of the frontier the way they do. Born in Brooklyn in 1942, he took a degree at Brooklyn College and a doctorate in American Civilization at Brown, then joined Wesleyan in 1966, where he helped build the American Studies and film studies programs and stayed until he retired in 2009. Regeneration Through Violence (1973) opened a trilogy on the myth of the frontier that continued with The Fatal Environment (1985) and Gunfighter Nation (1992); the first won the American Historical Association's Beveridge Award and the first and third were both National Book Award finalists. His method is to read sermons, dime novels, campaign speeches and Hollywood westerns as one continuous body of evidence about what a culture believes. He also writes historical fiction — Abe, a novel of the young Lincoln, won the Michael Shaara Award — and says the novels sharpen the history. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.