Say I am getting even with those cowboy novels that led a man who should’ve known better to travel someplace new and dangerous, exposing his children (and great-grandchildren) to robbery. For years, I felt a snobbish shame at how the books that brought my people to America were not great literature but junky Westerns. And yet, would life have been made easier if Shakespeare had engineered my great-grandmother’s appointment underneath the rutting streetcar?—I did research to help my actual and would-be history seem more real to you (and incidentally to me). I discovered the following heartening passage about my half-blind German jewel-thief ancestor-in-art. This is verbatim from The Encyclopedia of Frontier and Western Fiction, by John Tuska and Vicki Pierkaski:

MAY, KARL (1842–1912) Phenomenally popular author of travel and adventure novels, many of which were set in the American West, was born at Hohenstein-Ernsttahl, Saxony in Germany. May’s vision was impaired as a child because of malnutrition. He spent his youth in the shadow of the great famine that swept Central Europe in the mid 1840’s and the economic dislocations which led to the tragic weavers’ rebellion of 1844. But he was a gifted youth. The sacrifices of May’s family and the largesse of the Church enabled him to finish school and enter a teachers’ training college. Soon after graduation in 1861, however, he was arrested for stealing a watch and sentenced to a prison term which ended all possibility of a teaching career. May claimed throughout his life to have been innocent of this theft. After several months’ imprisonment, the depressed and bitter May swore vengeance on bourgeois society and began a life of fraud, swindle, and larceny which lasted twelve years and sent him back to jail for stretches from 1865–1868 and 1870–1874. While incarcerated, he read voraciously in the prison library, devouring travel memoirs and adventure stories of distant lands, particularly those about the Arab world and the American frontier.

The chastened May began his literary career writing village tales and cheap adventure stories for an unscrupulous publisher of family magazines and trashy short novels. Although he had never traveled outside Germany, he produced his first two books on the American “wild” West, “Jenseits der Felsengebirge” (Beyond the Rocky Mountains) and “In Fernen Western” (In the Far West).