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Maxine Hong Kingston, Charles L. Crow

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

“The history of the intermingling of human cultures is a history of trade—in objects like the narwhal’s tusk, in ideas, and in great narratives.”

—Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams

The Woman Warrior (1976), Maxine Hong Kingston’s first book, made her famous. Her arrival coincided with, and helped to fuel, an awareness of literature by women and ethnic minorities, and a change in the literature studied in high-school and college classrooms. Today Kingston is one of the most frequently taught of living American authors. Her works are studied in courses in English, women’s studies, Asian studies, ethnic studies, postmodern literature, postcolonial literature, …

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 …

Mark Medoff, Rudolf Erben

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Mark Medoff grew up in the East, lives in the New West, but dreams of the Old West. In his essay “Adios, Old West,” he nostalgically calls himself a “child of the Old West” (1). Medoffs protagonists likewise romanticize the Western American past because they associate it with their own youthful innocence. But they learn to live with the far less romantic realities of an increasingly eastemized West. Like Medoff, they know that cowboys can no longer be role models. While they regret the decline of the heroic tradition, they realize that they cannot emulate outdated stereotypes. In his drama, …

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 …

Ken Kesey, Bruce Carnes

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

No abstract provided.