American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West

Nate Blakeslee goes a long way to revealing the themes of American Wolf with the three quotations included as epigraphs. The third epigraph, taken from The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, speaks to the wolf’s place in the human imagination. Atwood says that “all stories are about wolves.” On a literal level that is untrue, which Atwood acknowledges when she clarifies that all stories worth repeating are about wolves, while “anything else is sentimental drivel.” This statement highlights one of Blakeslee’s major themes: the grip the wolf has on the on the human psyche.

This idea comes into focus in Chapter 4, where Blakeslee gives the reader a potted history of humans’ relations to wolves. For thousands of years, humans and wolves were in competition with each other, as early humans began to farm and keep livestock. Wolves roamed these lands and picked off those farmers’ animals in a way that posed a direct challenge to humans’ survival. This deeply primitive aspect to the relationship between the species has forever colored the wolf’s place in the human imagination. “In Western culture,” Blakeslee says, “the wolf became an embodiment of wickedness, from the Middle Ages, when the werewolf myth first appeared, to Grimm’s fairy tales in the early 19th century” (84).