What does the figure of the rugged cowboy have to do with effete high modernism? My dissertation responds to this question by uncovering the ties linking early twentieth-century Western novels by authors such as Owen Wister and Clarence Mulford to a series of modernist texts that likewise engage deeply entrenched frontier myths in a post-WWI context. Throughout the 1920s, notable modernist figures like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, and Ernest Hemingway, while striving to break with American literary tradition, simultaneously probed the residual mythic strands of frontier discourse that informed hugely popular cowboy stories such as Wister's The Virginian (1902) and Mulford?s Hopalong Cassidy (1910). In responding to these works, Fitzgerald, Cather, and Hemingway sought to confront the problem of depicting the post-war American by synthesizing the cowboy -- an emblem of the nation's past -- with "modern" figures ranging from Hemingway's wounded, sexually impotent expatriate Jake Barnes to Cather's cowhand-turned-archeologist Tom Outland to Fitzgerald's ambiguously ethnic "nobody from nowhere" Jay Gatsby.