Shane: History, Fiction, Film

192-page paperback / 5" x 8" / ISBN 9781589882188
Publication Date: 11/24/2026 (available for preorder)

"[Kuklick] writes with authority, perspective, and compassion."
―Philadelphia Inquirer

"[A]n accomplished historian of ideas."
―Wall Street Journal

What makes a movie great? Which films would you describe that way? Historian Bruce Kuklick’s account of the 1953 Western Shane explains how history, fiction, and movie making combined to create great art. Based on the novel Shane by Jack Schaefer, the script drew from historical happenings in Wyoming’s Johnson County in the 1880s. The acting of Alan Ladd, Jean Arthur, Van Heflin, Brandon DeWilde, and Jack Palance was just right. The cinematography captures the extraordinary beauty of the Wyoming landscape. And finally the movie dramatizes the conflict between two ways of life—wide open cattle ranching versus small-time farming—that fought for dominance as pioneers moved into the land of the West. Follow Bruce Kuklick as he reveals how this cinematic magic happened. Includes photographs.

PRAISE FOR BRUCE KUKLICK'S OTHER BOOKS:

"This is one of those rare books one wishes had been longer. [Kuklick] demonstrates successfully how the concept of fascism has changed its meaning and its place in American political discourse over the past century and more, providing entertaining quotes and examples along the way."
—The Nation on Fascism Comes to America

"Kuklick, an accomplished historian of ideas, turns his skills to Hollywood’s treatment of fascism. He explains why American entertainers, intellectuals, and others have so often resorted to the term 'fascism' to denounce things they don’t like: FDR’s New Deal, the Reagan Revolution and much else . . . He surmises that Americans’ obsession with fascism is the flip side of a collective inability to reckon with the calamitous gap between the Founders and contemporary America."
—The Wall Street Journal on Fascism Comes to America

"An exemplary encounter between intellectual history and philosophical thought."
—Times Literary Supplement on A History of Philosophy in America

"[A] history for grown-ups, lucid and unsparing, alert to our infinite capacity for deceit and self-deception.”
―Chicago Tribune on Death in the Congo

"An unusual and interesting book about mythmaking."
—Choice on The Fighting Sullivans

Bruce Kuklick is the author of fourteen books including To Every Thing a Season: Shibe Park and Urban Philadelphia (Princeton University Press); A Political History of the USA: One Nation Under God (Bloomsbury Academic), now in its third edition; Fascism Comes to America: A Century of Obsession in Politics and Culture (University of Chicago Press); and The Fighting Sullivans: How Hollywood and the Military Make Heroes (University Press of Kansas). His books have been translated into Dutch, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, and Spanish. Kuklick is the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is now Emeritus. He lives in Philadelphia.