This dazzling, richly inventive, powerfully wide-ranging book begins inColorado with Oscar Wilde. Wilde, after touring a mine, hangs out with cowboysand miners in a casino and is delighted by a sign above the piano playerreading, Please don't shoot the pianist; he is doing his best. Later Wildereflects: "I was struck with this recognition of the fact that bad art meritsthe penalty of death, and I felt that in this remote city, where the aestheticapplication of the revolver was clearly established.my apostolic task would bemuch simplified."Starting with the cowboy and the dandy--visionary figures at opposite ends ofthe iconic spectrum--Perry Meisel stages a history of American creativity whereWestern heroes and urban aesthetes are equal citizens of a Romantic culture, allvigorously enacting ideas of freedom, movement, and irony that are intriguinglysimilar to those at work in the jazz, blues, and rhythm and blues of AfricanAmerican culture. And rock and roll? Rock and roll is the link between Romanticand blues traditions.In clear, energetic prose, Meisel composes a portrait of American imaginationspacious enough to accommodate Emerson, Muddy Waters, Davy Crockett, ToniMorrison, and hip-hop; resourceful enough to resolve the unlikely meeting ofAfro-America and Anglo- America; and bold enough to unveil a family connectionbetween Elvis, Miles Davis, Virginia Woolf, and British psychedelic rock.Wearing its learning lightly, The Cowboy and the Dandy offers up a potentsynthesis of the cultural collisions and explosive incongruities integral toAmerican art and identity.