Until the second half of the twentieth century was American Western discourse under the umbrella of Frederik Turner's theory, stressing such triumph of civilization as discussed in “The Significance of the Frontier in American History" (1893). In 2000, Andrew C. Isenberg criticizes Turner for having imposed white-centered myth upon American Western discourse. In 2007, Stephen McVeigh, in accordance with Isenberg, suggests that Old Western History celebrating territorial expansion and justifying the persecution and predicament of nature and minorities in the States, should be replaced with New Western History focusing on race and environment and asserts that the replacement actually occurs. Meeting the upcoming needs to reinterpret American West, Elmore Leonard dramatizes Isenberg and McVeigh's ideas in Hombre (1961). Transgressing various conventions of Western literature, Leonard has his main character Hombre die an anti-heroic and obscure death. Michel Foucault's theory that a community contains unique, mutable norms of true or false and right or wrong distinct from those of other communities and that each member of a community is disciplined by its ideology offers a creative interpretation of the transgressive obscurities in the text of Hombre. Hombre's trans-border characterization and behavior intimates the authorial intention to expose the established western and cowboy myth as grounded on a one-sided white order and to demonstrate American West as genuinely hybrid.

Until the second half of the twentieth century was American Western discourse under the umbrella of Frederik Turner's theory, stressing such triumph of civilization as discussed in “The Significance of the Frontier in American History" (1893). In 2000, Andrew C. Isenberg criticizes Turner for having imposed white-centered myth upon American Western discourse. In 2007, Stephen McVeigh, in accordance with Isenberg, suggests that Old Western History celebrating territorial expansion and justifying the persecution and predicament of nature and minorities in the States, should be replaced with New Western History focusing on race and environment and asserts that the replacement actually occurs. Meeting the upcoming needs to reinterpret American West, Elmore Leonard dramatizes Isenberg and McVeigh's ideas in Hombre (1961). Transgressing various conventions of Western literature, Leonard has his main character Hombre die an anti-heroic and obscure death. Michel Foucault's theory that a community contains unique, mutable norms of true or false and right or wrong distinct from those of other communities and that each member of a community is disciplined by its ideology offers a creative interpretation of the transgressive obscurities in the text of Hombre. Hombre's trans-border characterization and behavior intimates the authorial intention to expose the established western and cowboy myth as grounded on a one-sided white order and to demonstrate American West as genuinely hybrid.

Elmore Leonard, Hombre, American West, cowboy, myth, Michel Foucault, hybrid