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American Studies

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Series

1978

Articles 1 - 5 of 5

Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Virginia Sorensen, L L. Lee, Sylvia B. Lee Jan 1978

Virginia Sorensen, L L. Lee, Sylvia B. Lee

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

“If you burrow for roots, it was the fault of my grandmother,” the protagonist of Virginia Sorensen’s novel The Man with the Key remarks. And although we must ignore the half-ironic reference to a fault—and remind ourselves that an author’s characters are not the author—this metaphor is an exact image of Virginia Sorensen’s world and of her works. Sorensen has published eight novels, most of them about the American West, as well as a number of short stories and a group of children’s books. Her roots are the very essence of almost all, and certainly of the best, of her …


Alfred Henry Lewis, Abe C. Ravitz Jan 1978

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.” …


Charles Alexander Eastman (Ohiyesa), Marion W. Copeland Jan 1978

Charles Alexander Eastman (Ohiyesa), Marion W. Copeland

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Because Charles Eastman’s best known book is his earliest, Indian Boyhood (1902), and because that autobiography and its sequel, From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1916), have been most often used as sources for studies of the cultural transition of the Sioux, the literary value of those and of Eastman’s later books has gone largely unexamined. Eastman subtitled the 1916 volume The Autobiography of an Indian, but one cannot therefore assume that the conventions of European-American autobiography control Eastman’s work.


Ruth Suckow, Abigail Ann Hamblen Jan 1978

Ruth Suckow, Abigail Ann Hamblen

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

In her Memoir Ruth Suckow speaks of the small Iowa town where she was born as a place that looked ahead toward fresh beginnings. She describes other towns where she lived as older and more settled. But all of them, she implies, are dependent upon the sunshine, rains, and rich fields of the great farming region that is known as the Midwest, the Middle West, or Mid-America.


Don Berry, Glen A. Love Jan 1978

Don Berry, Glen A. Love

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

In his first two novels of the early Oregon country, Trask and Moontrap, Northwestern author Don Berry placed himself within what has come to be perhaps the essential tradition in serious Western American literature. Like such earlier writers as Willa Gather, Robinson Jeffers, and Walter Van Tilburg Clark, and like his contemporary fellow-Northwesterner Gary Snyder, Don Berry conveys to us a sacramental belief that transcendent power or energy awaits man’s explorations within the natural world. Further, Berry’s work asserts that this participation, this ultimate reconciliation with the patterns of earth and sky, water and rock, must be undertaken in …