The Searchers

The amazing, true story behind the classic Western The Searchers—and how it was transformed into an American myth.

In 1836 in East Texas, nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker was kidnapped by Comanches. She was raised by the tribe and eventually became the wife of a warrior. Twenty-four years after her capture, she was reclaimed by the U.S. cavalry and Texas Rangers and restored to her white family, to die in misery and obscurity. Cynthia Ann’s story has been told and retold over generations to become a foundational American tale. The myth gave rise to operas and one-act plays, and in the 1950s to a novel by Alan LeMay, which would be adapted into one of Hollywood’s most legendary films, The Searchers, “The Biggest, Roughest, Toughest ... and Most Beautiful Picture Ever Made!” directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne.

Glenn Frankel, beginning in Hollywood and then returning to the origins of the story, creates a rich and nuanced anatomy of a timeless film and a quintessentially American myth. The dominant story that has emerged departs dramatically from documented history: it is of the inevitable triumph of white civilization, underpinned by anxiety about the sullying of white women by “savages.” What makes John Ford’s film so powerful, and so important, Frankel argues, is that it both upholds that myth and undermines it, baring the ambiguities surrounding race, sexuality, and violence in the settling of the West and the making of America.

Glenn Frankel worked for nearly thirty years for the Washington Post as a reporter, a foreign correspondent, and editor of the Washington Post Magazine. As Jerusalem bureau chief, he won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for “sensitive and balanced reporting from Israel and the Middle East.” His first book, Beyond the Promised Land: Jews and Arabs on the Hard Road to a New Israel, won the National Jewish Book Award. His second, Rivonia’s Children: Three Families and the Cost of Conscience in White South Africa, was a finalist for South Africa’s prestigious Alan Paton Award. Frankel is currently the director of the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin.

Praise for Glenn Frankel:

“A scrupulously researched, riveting examination of people who fought to make their country a better place.” —The New York Times Book Review on Rivonia’s Children

“This superb, gripping piece of reportage is a pivotal account of a new Israel struggling to be born.”—Publishers Weekly on Beyond the Promised Land

National print, online, and radio media campaign
Digital assets: author Q&A, essays on Bloomsbury.com
Coverage on film, history, Native American, and Western–interest media
Academic marketing/film studies courses
Author events in Los Angeles and Austin