"Continent's End" tracks the unique meaning of the West in regionalist writings between the First and Second World Wars, the mode's twentieth-century heyday. Since the nineteenth century, American regional writing had been associated with quaint locales tucked safely away from the modern world and its complicated problems, places that preserve truly "American" traditions and customs in a nation undergoing massive social, industrial, and technological changes. However, the West did not fit this model so well. As a place of promise and new beginnings—enabled by the latest technological and industrial innovations—it represented both the past and the future. Moreover, the very recent colonial history of the West and its multiethnic makeup made it seem not quite "American." The writings considered here, by Willa Cather, D.H. Lawrence, Robinson Jeffers, and Nathanael West, emphasize these aspects of the modern West. I show that these authors imagined the West as a particularly modern, un-American place, something reflected in the very forms of their writings. As I argue in the chapters that follow, Western literary regionalism was an important mode through which writers could express their objections to the rampant nationalist feeling that pervaded the U.S. in the aftermath of the First World War—not to mention the extreme violence and great folly of the war itself. "Continent's End" reveals the regional mode's potential to resist both a national literary style and nationalist ideologies in general by discovering a modern cosmopolitanism in the form and content of Western regional writings.