The Western has been seen as a key genre for understanding both the American national character and the particulars of Hollywood, but there are now very few contemporary studies of this once foundational genre. The articles in this Special Issue, coming out of the Lonely Are the Brave conference of 2021, aim to revisit the Western, and the post-war Western specifically, in order to revive scholarship surrounding these texts, to interrogate existing models of understanding the history of the genre, and to examine how the genre treats ideas connected to time and its passing as attached to the American west and its depictions on-screen.