Davy Crockett was a 19th century frontiersmen who fought in wars, served in the U.S house of representatives and furthermore was a writer. His writing will be what we are looking at more closely today. We feel in order to more accurately understand writing from a single author that some good pretext context is very important. So we know that Davy Crockett was an American folk hero, frontiersmen, soldier, and politician. His stories also for the time period were somewhat oddly all fiction. So these stories tend to be fantastical in nature and pretty outlandish. Also we find that certain themes sort of arise of masculinity and what that meant for Americans at the time. But I think in order to understand his writing you have to understand what these stories are representing and who they were written by. Davy was the very definition of a patriotic explorer and wanted to represent the west as this sort of fantastical thing filled with adventure, opportunity and freedom. This is evident in his writing that can almost seem rhetorical at times. These sort of fantastical folk tales he wrote did a great job at painting this incredible picture of the west and this is important to understand when reading his work. 

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The Open Anthology of Earlier American Literature Copyright © 2016, 2017 by Timothy Robbins is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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