Dirty Wars: Landscape, Power, and Waste in Western American Literature

Since World War II, the American West has become the nation’s military arsenal, proving ground, and disposal site. Through a wide-ranging discussion of recent literature produced in and about the West, Dirty Wars explores how the region’s iconic landscapes, invested with myths of national virtue, have obscured the West’s crucial role in a post–World War II age of “permanent war.”
 
In readings of western—particularly southwestern—literature, John Beck provides a historically inf…