Richard Slotkin

Richard Sidney Slotkin (born November 8, 1942) is a cultural critic and historian. He is the Olin Professor of English and American Studies, Emeritus at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and, since 2010, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Slotkin writes novels, predominantly historical ones, alongside his historical research, and uses the process of writing the novels to clarify and refine his historical work.

In Regeneration Through Violence, the first of his trilogy on the mythology of the American West, Richard Slotkin shows how the attitudes and traditions that shape American culture evolved from the social and psychological anxieties of European settlers struggling in a savage new world to claim the land and displace the Native Americans. Using the popular literature of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries -- including captivity narratives, the Daniel Boone tales, and the writings of Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Melville -- Slotkin traces the full development of this myth