Digital Commons Network^™

Louis Owens, Linda Lizut Helstern

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

“'I prefer infinitions to definitions,’” Alex Yazzie, the cross-dressing Navajo anthropologist in Louis Owens’ Bone Game, declares (46). So did Louis Owens. In his life, in his death, and above all in his writing, Louis Owens (1948-2002), novelist, essayist, literary and cultural critic, crossed boundaries and refused definitions. Born in Lompoc, California, Owens came to understand the arid landscape of the west through the lens of his early childhood in the Yazoo bottoms of Mississippi. He was a Native mixedblood who acknowledged not only his multi-tribal heritage, Choctaw on his father's side and Cherokee on his mother’s, but the …

Reading Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, James H. Maguire

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

“Marilynne Robinson has written a first novel that one reads as slowly as poetry—and for the same reason: The language is so precise, so distilled, so beautiful that one doesn’t want to miss any pleasure it might yield up to patience” (Schreiber 14). Many other reviewers, critics, and general readers agree with reviewer Le Anne Schreiber that Robinson’s novel is beautifully written. And since Housekeeping’s virtual poetry echoes the beauty of the language found in works of nineteenth-century American writers such as Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson, it comes as no surprise that Robinson’s favorite authors are the American Romantics.

J. Ross Brown, Peter Wild

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Caught by his own whimsical pen often used to illustrate his books, the writer sits on a log with sketch pad in hand. He’s in the midst of a vast, wild country. Behind him are mountains and, closer, an apparently abandoned adobe. Beneath a sans-souci floppy hat, he gazes over spectacles comically slid down his nose with that look of the artist in the intense act of considering a scene or of a schoolmarm about to scold. Yet there’s also a different kind of tension to his body. One eyebrow is raised, almost as if he’s listening for something behind …

Joy Harjo, Rhonda Pettit

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Who is Joy Harjo? To anyone familiar with Native American writing and/or contemporary poetry, the obvious answer to this question might be: a Native American poet. Readers familiar with her work might also consider her a Western U. S. writer, since she lives in the Southwest and uses Western landscapes and locales as settings, as vehicles for psychological probing, and as subjects endowed with transcendent power. If these labels seem reductive, other cultural and literary locations Harjo occupies complicate the issue of her identity.

Frank Bergon, Gregory L. Morris

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

The story of Frank Bergon and of his fiction might well be said to begin with his grandparents. Bergon’s maternal grandparents—Esteban and Petra Mendive—both came to America, around the turn of the century, from the Basque region of Spain. His grandfather, born in Guernica, arrived first and eventually met his wife-to-be—a mail-order bride—at the train station in Salt Lake City. The two moved to Battle Mountain, Nevada, and there started a grocery and the Basque hotel; Bergon remembers, in fact, his grandmother operating the hotel until well into her eighties and well after her husband’s death. Esteban and Petra Mendive …

Richard Ronan, Jane Vanstavern

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

The new world, the new times, the new peoples, the new vistas, need a tongue according . . .
—Walt Whitman

Richard Louis Ronan was a poet, playwright, and ikebana flower designer who lived in San Francisco with his partner, Bill Pittman, during the 1980s. He died of AIDS in 1989 at age 43, having produced six collections of poetry, seven plays, and several unpublished manuscripts. He received not only a Dodge Foundation Grant to teach poetry but also, while studying at Berkeley, the Emily Cook and Eisner Prizes. His versatility did not prevent him from excelling in several poetic …

Janet Campbell Hale, Frederick Hale

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

In the early 1970s, at an early stage of the “Native American Renaissance,” a period that witnessed a recrudescence of tribal literary efforts, historical consciousness, and demands for civil rights, Janet Campbell Hale quietly began to make her mark on the Native American cultural landscape. A young member of the Coeur d’Alene tribe, she was then residing in the San Francisco area and had written a novel for adolescents titled The Owl’s Song, which inaugurated a noteworthy career in ethnic fiction and has gone through many printings. Like most other Native American authors, Hale has not been highly prolific …

Thomas And Elizabeth Savage, Sue Hart

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Although Elizabeth Fitzgerald and Thomas Savage were born on opposite sides of the country, from early on it seemed as if they were as destined for each other as they were for careers in writing.

Tess Gallagher, Ron Mcfarland

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

The voice of the poet may be one or polyvocal: bardic, prophetic, political, satiric, meditative, bucolic, sentimental, nostalgic. The voice of the poet may be deep or shallow, profound or silly, complex or easy, loud or soft. Nothing guarantees that we will like the work of any given poet except our own direct engagement with the poems. If some of our friends tell us we will like, or dislike, Tess Gallagher’s poems, it is probably because of something they know about us or about the poems themselves, and that something is most likely the voice they hear, whether consciously or …

Rex Beach, Abe C. Ravitz

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

One apocalyptic adventure marked the productive life and prolific literary career of Rex Ellingwood Beach (1877-1949), novelist, journalist, pioneer screenwriter, and sportsman: at the turn of the century as a spirited twenty-three-year-old spoiling for adventure and seeking quick wealth, he joined the mass of frenzied humanity heading for the gold fields of the Klondike. Though a fortune in nuggets eluded him and though his land speculation never brought the truly big score, Rex Beach discovered something more valuable than “gold in the pan": Alaska.

Jeanne Williams, Judy Alter

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Author of fifty books, all but two of them fiction, Jeanne Williams is a prolific and versatile novelist. She has over ten million books in print and has three times won the Spur Award for fiction from Western Writers of America and once the prestigious Levi Strauss Golden Saddleman Award for the Best Western Book of the Year. She writes convincingly of England, Medieval Wales, Norway, Mexico, and the United States, especially the frontier in Kansas, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. In spite of this wide-ranging subject matter, the American West and its history remain an enduring interest, and Williams …

John Graves, Dorys Crow Grover

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

John Graves, a Texas-born naturalist, visited the Brazos River in north-central Texas in 1957, after a decade of world wandering, and wrote a farewell to a river, a book that has become a pastoral classic in American belles-lettres. Goodbye to a River has since been joined by two other nature volumes, and all three have earned for Graves a considerable reputation for his literary style. M. E. Bradford writes that Graves’s voice is “deceptively simple and disarmingly personal in its flavor” (“John Graves” 142). In his craft, he joins fellow Texans Roy Bedichek and J. Frank Dobie, and his …

John C. Van Dyke: The Desert, Peter Wild

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

During the late spring of 1898, a strange figure made his way eastward through windy San Gorgonio Pass and disappeared into the thousands of square miles of desert beyond. He didn’t know where he was going, his horse carried only Spartan supplies, and, to top off his prospects, he was seriously ill. The few men who watched him leave civilization shook their heads. Surely he would die out there in the uninhabited, bleak spaces stretching off for hundreds of miles, die of starvation, thirst, snake bite, madness—almost pick what you will. At the time, coastal southern California was booming with …

Edward Dorn, William Mcpheron

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Edward Dorn is a political poet committed to the ideals of democratic culture. A fierce partisan of the free play of critical thought, he is acutely sensitive to the socio-economic forces aligned against an open society. “Democracy,” he insists, “literally has to be cracked on the head all the time to keep it in good condition” (Contemporary Authors 129), and he understands its most serious enemy to be capitalism’s enormous power, which in the post-World Wai- II era has reached beyond the marketplace to infiltrate and control every aspect of American life. Though he despises the bourgeois ethos that …

Ole Edvart Rølvaag, Ann Moseley

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Like the Norwegian folk hero the Ash Lad whom he was so fond of writing about, Ole Edvart Rølvaag's life and works can be seen as a search for the truth about himself and his world—both the Norwegian world whence he came and the American world to which he came. Combining realism with myth, Rølvaag explores the physical, psychological, and moral effects of Midwestern life on the immigrant pioneer as well as the rich mythic background that supports and universalizes the characters, structures, and themes of his fiction. In his analysis of the tension between Norwegian cultural traditions and the …

John Gregory Dunne, Mark Royden Winchell

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

In the January 1981 issue of Horizon, John Lahr writes: “California is a state of amateur outdoorsmen—of runners, of swimmers, of bikers, of sailors, and of golfers. Here, the surface of life can be enjoyed without analysis. Amidst the sun, surf, and caesar salads, intellectual stimulation is never a high priority.” He goes on to trash those who “never question the consequences of Los Angeles or the California scene . . . —the general absence of community, the moral stupor, the greedy self-aggrandizement, and the emotional impoverishment that characterize and enchant the place” (“Entrepreneurs” 39). These comments, so typical …

William Saroyan, Edward Halsey Foster

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

What is there still to say about William Saroyan? Was he, after all, primarily a writer of his time—whom we read mainly to recover a sense of what his generation enjoyed? Was he, finally, as many have insisted, an entertainer, pleasant to read but easy to forget?

James Welch, Peter Wild

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

On their way to work, Americans hurried past disciples of Hare Krishna, orange-robed and seemingly from another planet, chanting in the streets. Home again that night they watched Neil Armstrong tread the lunar rubble, or they gaped at villages swelling up in instant clouds of napalm. In a land that idolized youth, college students were “trashing” their own campuses, while young blacks, in a strange counterpart to the war in far-off Asia, were setting fire to their own ghettos. The greatest scandal since Teapot Dome was about to give yet another violent shake to Americans’ confidence in who they were …

Janet Lewis, Charles L. Crow

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Janet Lewis’s writing career has spanned nearly sixty years, long enough for her to reflect, were she interested in the subject, on the disparity between excellence and fame. She has published poetry, short stories, essays, children’s books, opera libretti, and novels. She has been praised by distinguished writers and critics, including Theodore Roethke and Donald Davie. Two of her novels, The Wife of Martin Guerre and The Trial of Soren Quist, have been hailed as masterpieces. She remains little known, however, even though she has a circle of enthusiastic admirers.

Alfred Henry Lewis, Abe C. Ravitz

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

He was a cowboy and a lawyer, a journalist and a novelist. At ease passing the time of day with drifters in front of Melinda's House of Call at Watrous (Mora County) in the sparse territory of New Mexico or debating socio-economic philosophy with sophisticated Tammany politicians just outside City Hall in New York, Alfred Henry Lewis—Western regionalist and Eastern muckraker—was enchanted by America’s land of legend and myth beyond the frontier, and he forever glanced backward with nostalgia at his “pampas years,” when he roved "for many moons" between “the Canadian in the Panhandle and the Gila in Arizona.” …