American Studies Commons^™

Alonzo "Old Block" Delano, Nicolas S. Witschi

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

When Alonzo Delano died on 8 September 1874, newspapers throughout the Northern California region lamented the passing of a favorite local celebrity. A death notice issued by the Sacramento Union on 10 September (reprinted a day later by San Francisco’s Daily Alta California), observed that Delano “was known by reputation throughout the State as an author and a man of integrity. [. . .] He was a writer of much native humor and plainness of speech, abounding in facts, anxious to do justice to all and injury to none.” The San Francisco Chronicle echoed this sentiment, adding that he …

Reading Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona, Karen E. Ramirez

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Helen Hunt Jackson was one of America’s most renowned and prolific female writers of the 1870s and 1880s, best known during her lifetime (1830-1885) and into the early twentieth century for her poetry, domestic essays, travel sketches, and moralistic novels. However, as Jackson herself predicted, her most enduring legacy is her writing advocating American Indian rights (Higginson, “Helen” 151). Most significantly, her 1884 novel Ramona protests American Indian displacement in southern California and, more broadly, criticizes Anglo-American conquest through land acquisition. A bestseller when it appeared, Ramona has never gone out of print; has been translated into many languages; was …

Mary Clearman Blew, Evelyn I. Funda

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Defying the Welch family edict to “Never speak aloud of what you feel deeply,” Mary Clearman Blew has garnered national recognition as an eminent writer in the American west by choosing to write candidly about the riddle of her family, their deeply felt losses, and her sense of “the contradictions of double vision, of belonging in place and being out of place” (Balsamroot 4; Bone Deep 174). Unsparingly honest and accessible in eight books of fiction and nonfiction, in person Blew is, nevertheless, a quiet, dignified, and reserved woman who still thinks of herself as a bookworm, the girl …

Josephine Miles, Erik Muller

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

“You could say I saw California grow up. Right along with me!” So Josephine Miles linked her life and region (Childress 40). The link between her poetry and California has not always been declared by the poet or detected by her readers. Miles mused upon the problem: “Sometimes there’s a certain kind of critic that says I’m a California poet [. . .] he says I have a lot of loose lines and a lot of locale. But then another critic will say, ‘She’s not to be identified as anything but English because her poetry is rather neat and universal’” …

James Stevens, James H. Maguire

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

By 1930, James Stevens had gained a national reputation as one of the Northwest’s most promising and outspoken young writers. Seventy-five years later, he has slipped so far into obscurity that relatively few people know of his contributions not only to Northwest writing but also to American literature in general and to the literature of the American West in particular. His tall tales made Paul Bunyan one of the great heroes of American popular culture. The controversial literary manifesto he co-authored with Oregon author H. L. Davis led to a new era in the history of the Northwest’s literature. And …

Gary Paul Nabhan, Gioia Woods

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Between spoonfuls of posole at the Morning Glory Cafe in Flagstaff, Arizona, Gary Paul Nabhan mused about the distinctive character of western American literature. “What is western literature about?” I asked him. Without hesitation, he replied, “It is about a process of disorientation and reorientation.” The mountains, sand dunes, and canyons of the western landscape govern western imagination. That landscape, he believes, is responsible for the dis- and reorientation that characterizes the work of many western writers. Nabhan continued, “I should say that in an odd way, that’s even true of Native American literature [....] Leslie Silko writes about the …

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 …

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, …

Robet Roripaugh, John D. Nesbitt

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

In an essay entitled “Literature of the Cowboy State” in 1978, Robert Roripaugh opened his discussion by declaring, “As far as serious literature from the American West is concerned, the least known, most neglected and uncataloged body of writing [. . .] is that of Wyoming” (26). He goes on to assert that there is little consistency “in the state’s literary output” (26). Twenty-five years later, Roripaugh’s remarks are still valid. Despite an attempt by several well-meaning scholars in the late 1980s to put together a literary anthology for the centennial of Wyoming’s statehood, and despite the recent compilation of …

Ana Castillo, Sara L. Spurgeon

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

It may seem odd to call Ana Castillo a western writer, considering she has lived most of her life in Chicago. Geographically, this city would not generally qualify as “western.” But the images, tensions, and themes that drive Castillo’s work are the same that currently challenge traditional definitions of the “west” as a place bounded strictly by geography. Historically, of course, Chicago at one time imagined itself as the prototypical western city, but the frontier moved on, and with it the American notion of what the west was, where it was located, what it looked like, and who inhabited it. …

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 …

Reading Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine, P. Jane Hafen

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

The writings of Louise Erdrich not only reflect their author’s multilayered, complex background but they also confound a variety of literary genre and cultural categories. Although Erdrich is known primarily as a successful contemporary Native American writer, her finely polished writing reveals both her Turtle Mountain Chippewa and Euroamerican heritages. Nevertheless, her diverse imageries, subjects, and textual strategies reaffirm imperatives of American Indian survival. She prescribes the literary challenge for herself and other contemporary Native writers in her essay “Where I Ought to Be: A Writer’s Sense of Place”: “In the light of enormous loss, [contemporary Native writers] must tell …

Michael Mcclure, Rod Phillips

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

The author of more than twenty volumes of poetry, over twenty plays, two novels, and three collections of essays, Michael McClure is one of the most prolific and enduring figures to emerge from the Beat movement. As one of the five poets to begin his career at the Six Gallery reading in 1955, the reading which launched the Beat movement, he shares a long and rich history with Allen Ginsberg, Philip Whalen, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Philip Lamantia, and many other writers of San Francisco’s Beat period.

Lawson Fusao Inada, Shawn Holliday

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

On February 19, 1942, approximately ten weeks after Japanese fighter planes attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt approved Executive Order 9066, which authorized the removal of all people of Japanese descent from vulnerable areas of the United States’ west coast. Meant as a security measure to protect the dams, power plants, harbors, railroads, and airports from spies who would attempt to compromise America’s vulnerable infrastructure, this order eventually led to the complete removal of all Japanese from Arizona, California, Oregon, and Washington, relocating 120,000 people by mid-1942 (Only What xi-xii). Such actions …

Abigail Scott Duniway, Debra Shein

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

In 1895, as she launched a new journal dedicated to bringing equal rights to all the women of America, Abigail Scott Duniway had already been a key figure in the national woman’s movement for over two decades. And during those years, dramatic changes had been taking place. As she wrote, “though ‘Liberty for all the inhabitants of the land’ has not yet been secured, we have made much permanent progress, and now nobody doubts our ultimate success” (“Salutatory” PE 16 Aug. 1895). At the beginning of Duniway’s career, women’s rights were severely restricted. With few exceptions, marriage brought an end …

William Kittredge, Ron Mcfarland

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Equally at home whether speaking before the Humanities Colloquium at Cedar City, Utah, the Nature Conservancy at Bend, Oregon, the Regional Newswriting Colloquium at Salt Lake City, or the Wyoming Outdoor Council at Sheridan, William (Bill) Kittredge has emerged over the past thirty years as one of the most prolific and outspoken exponents of the New West. He has edited or co-edited seven anthologies ranging in nature from Great Action Stories (1977) and Stories into Film (1979) to the monumental Montana compilation, The Last Best Place (1988) and The Portable Western Reader (1997). He is the author of two notable …

Reading Louis L'Amour's Hondo, Joseph Mills

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

I don't give a damn what anyone else thinks, I know it’s literature and I know it will be read 100 years from now.
—Louis L'Amour on his work (Jackson 168)

In 1946, publisher and editor Leo Margulies invited Louis L’Amour to a party in New York. Each of them had a problem. L’Amour, having served in the Army during World War II, had recently returned to the States to discover the pulp fiction markets in which he had established himself as a writer were changing. In the 1930s, he had sold numerous adventure, sports, and detective stories to magazines …

Frank Chin, John Charles Goshert

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Born in Berkeley in 1940, Frank Chin lived in the Motherlode country of California’s Sierra foothills during the Second World War before returning to the San Francisco Bay Area. He attended the University of California at Berkeley as an English major, but was drawn away to work for railroad companies throughout the west. Such early experiences of movement and transience would provide the foundations for the shifting settings of much of his drama, fiction, and criticism that would follow; additionally, this transience would also underlie the complex tone, treatment, and perception of Asian American identity that characterizes his work and …

Desert Literature: The Early Period, Peter Wild

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Although not entirely free, ours is a fairly easy ride when it comes to living on deserts. Today, in order to survive, few people out in the lands of the giant cactus and the Gila monster eat grasshoppers or spend day after day hoeing beans in the punishing 110° heat. Instead, today’s residents enjoy a created world of air-conditioned homes, schools, and shopping malls. The point is that few people live in the desert anymore. They live on it. Theirs is a colonial society, imposed on the land, fed from the outside, and infused with the life-giving juice of energy …

Reading Wallace Stegner's Angle Of Repose, Russell Burrows

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Wallace Stegner must have felt he was gambling as he settled on Angle of Repose (1971) as the title for his most important novel—the one that would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize (1972). “Angle of repose” happens to be a bit of technical jargon from mining, and Stegner meant to extend it to marriage. This unlikely metaphor begins with the practical understanding that mine debris will tumble downhill only so far, because as a slope levels out, the rocks and the gravels and the like will start to pile up at their respective “angles of repose.” And so, …

New Formalist Poets Of The American West, April Linder

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

In the late 1970s and early eighties, when most American poets were writing autobiographical free-verse lyrics, a handful of mavericks flouted literary fashion. They used rhyme, meter, and regular form—both traditional and innovative—and tried narrative, satire, and light verse. In an essay entitled “Can Poetry Matter?” (1991) one of these poets, Dana Gioia, accused contemporary poets of writing mostly for each other. “The poetry boom has been a distressingly confined phenomenon,” he wrote. “Decades of public and private funding have created a large professional class for the production of teachers, graduate students, editors, publishers, and administrators. Based mostly in universities, …

Gretel Ehrlich, Gregory L. Morris

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

As a Western writer, Gretel Ehrlich is something of a curious case. By birth a Californian, Ehrlich has nevertheless shaped her identity as a Western writer by experience gathered elsewhere in the West. At the same time, while Ehrlich has lived and written extensively about her life in north-central Wyoming—and built her considerable reputation upon that work—the arc of her experience has carried her for the moment back to her native California. This movement from place to place (Ehrlich has been a writer of many places in her career) suggests a dominant tension in her life and work: that of …

Narrow Way To Nearby, David Robertson

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Rain was the forcast. Rain was in the air. Rain was on the ground in puddles. Ecotourist drove east through the morning drizzle in his new black Honda down Old Davis Road to California Fish and Game. After he was pasted with a name tag and scanned for metal, he boarded the bus for a slow ride to an island of mud in the middle of Yolo Bypass. Fences kept invited guests apart from an impromptu stage. Bleachers for the press rimmed the perimeter. Reporters in raincoats slouched near their cameras covered in plastic. A big wooden sign anchored with …

Dana Gioia, April Linder

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

The poet Dana Gioia is a pivotal figure in contemporary American letters. One of the most respected and vocal writers identified with the controversial movement commonly called the New Formalism, Gioia has helped to redefine the face of contemporary poetry. In his 1991 Atlantic Monthly essay, “Can Poetry Matter?” Gioia critiqued the American poetry scene, arguing that contemporary poets were writing mainly for an audience of other poets. He claimed that because poets weren’t trying to reach a general audience, contemporary poetry generally was going unread by non-poets, even by college graduates who regularly read novels. Gioia blamed the loss …

Desert Literature: The Modern Period, Peter Wild

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Today’s desert writing is so diffuse, ranging from detective novels to spiritual guides, that it would seem impossible to make much sense of this popular genre. However, if we put it in context, looking at the changing attitudes toward deserts over the sweep of the years and at the books growing out of them, what at first appears an impenetrable welter begins to make sense.

Reading A.B. Guthrie's The Big Sky, Fred Erisman

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Shortly after midday on 31 August 1837, thirty-four-year-old Ralph Waldo Emerson stepped before the Harvard chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society in Cambridge, Massachusetts, preparing to give the annual oration associated with the university’s commencement exercises. In the audience, in addition to some two hundred students, were such luminaries as the physician-essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Abolitionist Wendell Phillips, the poet James Russell Lowell, and the governor of Massachusetts, Edward Everett, who later became president of Harvard. Emerson’s presentation, entitled “The American Scholar,” lasted for slightly more than an hour (Richardson 261-63).

Reading Willa Cather's The Song Of The Lark, Evelyn Funda

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

When Willa Gather sent her publisher the manuscript for The Song of the Lark in March 1915, she wrote him that unless he had lived in the West, he couldn’t possibly understand how much of the region she had put into the novel. It expressed the “My country, ’tis of thee” feeling that the West always gave her, and, she concluded, when she grew old and couldn’t explore the desert anymore, all she need do to recapture the sense of place would be to lift the lid of the novel (Willa Gather to Ferris Greenslet, March 28, 1915—I paraphrase here …

Ivan Doig, A. Carl Bredahl

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

The big sky of the American West has the striking effect of focusing the viewer’s attention on both land and sky. On America’s Great Plains and High Desert, the sky dominates, forcing the eye away from the traditional Judeo-Christian vertical orientation and toward the horizon, generating a remarkable sense of balance. American Western narrative carries this story of balance and possibility. The Westerner finds himself accepting the landscape, indeed drawing upon it for physical and spiritual sustenance. Even the most imposing of surfaces—the landscape of eastern Utah or of the Dakota badlands—share a vulnerability with man as evidenced by erosion, …

Desert Literature: The Middle Period - J. Smeaton Chase, Edna Brush Perkins, And Edwin Corle, Peter Wild

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Whether through religion, sex, or art, people crave excitement, to be elevated above ordinary experiences. A frequent theme both in our lives and in literature, this desire often involves the interplay of fantasy and reality. Is Hamlet indeed mad—does he actually see camels in the clouds—or is he quite coolly calculating, shrewdly manipulating people? For our part, when we fall in love, are we being led yet again by our delusions toward disaster?