Daily Inspiration Quote by Carl Clinton Van Doren

The American West, Van Doren implies, didn’t enter the 19th-century imagination as geography so much as genre. In the “popular mind,” the territory beyond the Mississippi is “a strange land,” a phrase that quietly indicts Eastern readers for treating the continent’s interior as exotic, half-known, and conveniently malleable. The kicker is his sly turn: explorers and travelers “did the work of fiction.” That’s not just a comment on tall tales; it’s a critique of how purportedly factual accounts were consumed the way novels are consumed - for sensation, atmosphere, and moral drama - while still enjoying the authority of “report.”

The sentence also situates James Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie as an early attempt to novelize that space, and then undercuts its cultural reach: it “had few followers.” Van Doren, a critic writing with early-20th-century hindsight, is tracing a lag between expansion on the ground and representation on the page. The West was being mapped, settled, fought over, and dispossessed, yet the dominant narrative machinery hadn’t fully arrived. That vacuum let travel writing and exploration accounts become de facto mythmaking, shaping what audiences thought the West was before a robust literary tradition could complicate it.

Subtext: “strange land” isn’t about the land’s strangeness. It’s about the reader’s distance - and the ease with which distance turns other people’s home into a story engine. Van Doren’s intent is diagnostic: he’s showing how “nonfiction” became the country’s first special effects department, manufacturing the West as spectacle long before it became a crowded shelf of novels.