John George Cawelti (December 31, 1929 – May 30, 2022) was an American novelist who wrote The Spy Story as well as works about the genres of detective fiction and westerns.
Cawelti was one of the pioneers in establishing an academic respectability to the study of popular culture.
His 1971 book The Six Gun Mystique analyzes the messages contained in the western novels which were very popular for many decades with the public.
His seminal Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture dissected the formulas used in these popular genres and argued for their importance alongside "high" literature.
This article about a novelist of the United States born in the 1920s is a stub.