A Straight Deal or The Ancient Grudge

A Straight Deal or The Ancient Grudge, published by Macmillan in March 1920, is a work of political argument by Owen Wister (1860-1938), the American author whose novel The Virginian helped invent the literary Western. Written in the wake of the First World War, the book urges Americans to drop their inherited resentment of England, the ‘ancient grudge’ dating from the Revolution, and argues that school textbooks had kept anti-British feeling alive long after it served any purpose. Wister had already attacked wartime Germany in The Pentecost of Calamity (1915), and this volume completes his case for Anglo-American partnership. Read today, it is a primary source for the postwar campaign to align the two English-speaking powers, written by a famous novelist in full polemical voice. Free PDF download available on BDeBooks.