Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Alberto Ríos, Peter Wild

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Caught up in the current cultural ferment involving race, sex, and ethnic identity, people tend to forget. The all-time best-selling novel in the nineteenth-century United States was an antislavery book written by a woman, and in the 1920s black writer W. E. B. Du Bois was widely celebrated by a large number of critics. Periodically over the course of the nation’s history, both as concerns the general culture and our literature specifically, what we today call minorities, and how we perceive them, have exerted huge influences, shaping much of our lives, from what we wear and eat to what we …

Vern Rutsala, Erik Muller

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

According to one version of regionalism, the poet readily draws from the experience of living in a particular place. The poet’s youthful books, like many first novels, depict the autobiography and the home scene. Later, the poet learns to generalize from the local or to abandon it altogether for a broader, more significant canvas. The poet progresses to writing about the universal.

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.

Rick Bass, O. Alan Weltzien

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

In July 1992, Newsweek ran an article titled “Don’t Fence Them Out,” a piece that explores the Intermountain literary renaissance of the past few decades. The article includes a sidebar describing places where there are “Too many writers,” listing “Albuquerque,” “Portland,” and “All of Montana.” The same sidebar includes four titles under the heading “Books walking off the shelves out West (but good luck finding 'em back East).” One of those works listed is Rick Bass’s The Ninemile Wolves (1992), his sixth book. Bass’s career substantiates the prideful claim reflected in the title of Montana’s centennial literary anthology, The Last …

Reading Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing In America, Joseph Mills

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Last summer, I hiked along the Tomales Point trail in Point Reyes, a National Seashore, north of San Francisco. On my left was the Pacific Ocean, and on my right were fields that were once dairylands but are now a Tule elk preserve.

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 …

Bernard Devoto, Russell Burrows

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Bernard DeVoto spent the years of the Second World War hard at work on two books. Although very different from one another, both books happened to have Western settings, far from the home DeVoto had been making for himself and his family in Cambridge, Massachusetts. One of these books seemed to pour itself from him, mounting to 100,000 words, then swelling to 150,000, and rounding out at about 170,000. Its subject was the mountain fur trade, the larger-than-life stories of Jim Bridger, Kit Carson, Tom Fitzpatrick, Joe Meek, Chief Joseph, Black Hawk, and many other trappers and natives. Making the …

Laura Jensen, Dina Ben-Lev

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Poet and critic Tess Gallagher has described Laura Jensen as “the Einstein of the ordinary.” Just as Einstein's theories disrupted the then common-sense understanding of a universe governed by immutable laws, Jensen’s poems transform our view of the everyday things we take for granted, the ordinary birds and flowers we no longer notice. “Behind a poem is a bad intention / to make the reader worry deeply,” Jensen writes in “What Is Poetry?”, a poem from her first chapbook (After 16). Her poems “worry” us because they force us to confront our fear of the unpredictability of the world. …

Garrett Hongo, Laurie Filipelli

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Garrett Kongo’s poetic voice rises from cultural, historical, and personal memories. As a Yonsei (a fourth-generation Japanese American) born in Hawai i and raised largely in Los Angeles, his concerns span time and place, and his style links Asian and European traditions. He writes from the crowded trains and serene temples of his ancestral homeland, the lush jungles and active volcanoes of his birthplace, and the racial tension and dispossession of life in urban America, fitting the pieces together in a mosaic of self, family, and culture.

George Bird Grinnell, Robley Evans

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

As the United States frontier moved west in the nineteenth century, it developed as a locus for the myth of the American superman, a fabled combination of self-reliance and self-development in which the frontiersman fought savage beasts and wild Indians to push a great civilization through plains and forests to the Pacific Ocean. Ironically, to participate in the frontier’s expansion was to contribute to its destruction: as destiny and technology seemed to carry the nation toward its grand fulfillment, the wilderness with its challenging animals and murderous savages diminished. By the 1880s, thoughtful Americans believed that the West could no …

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 …

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, …

Jane Gilmore Rushing, Lou H. Rodenberger

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Jane Gilmore Rushing begins an article entitled “People and Place,” commissioned by The Writer (September 1969) after publication of her second novel, with this self-assessment: “I think I am what you call a regional writer.” Such candid acknowledgement by a writer of what she perceives her role to be in the literary world is rare. Most writers steer clear of the designation of “regionalist,” even those whose works convey a powerful sense of place. Nevertheless, Jane Rushing’s explanation of her authorial selfimage dispels any doubt that she does indeed see herself as a regionalist, whose mission is to share with …

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 …

Theodore Strong Van Dyke, Peter Wild

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Few writers, no matter how popular in their day, can point to “firsts” in their literary careers. As to Theodore Strong Van Dyke, in the midst of the booming land sales of the 1880s, when trainloads of Midwesterners crowded into southern California to be fleeced by ready hucksters, Van Dyke sowed doubts about the direction which was applauded as progress. Particularly through his lightly sardonic novel Millionaires of a Day (1890), this friend of John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt initiated an American uneasiness that the hoopla over the region, and over the American West generally, was false, “. . . …

Laura Ingalls Wilder, Fred Erisman

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

A fluke of geography makes ours a westward-moving culture. Explorers and European settlers, the Atlantic at their backs, necessarily moved westward in their endeavors, and the pattern was begun. Succeeding eras saw new populations, the Gold Rush, and the Homestead Act, steadily pushing the line of settlement westward, until movement to the west became intimately associated in the public mind with the course of “progress” and the advancement of the nation. From this association come two of the most evocative of American cultural myths, those shared stories in a society’s history that provide “a symbolizing function that is central to …

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.

Harold Bell Wright, Lawrence V. Tagg

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

In 1894 a penniless and ailing twenty-two-year-old man went into the Ozark Mountains near the town of Branson in southwestern Missouri in the hope of regaining his health. While his efforts were successful, the trip also set in motion the experiences that led to the writing of some of the most popular Western novels of the period, best sellers that brought fame and fortune to their author—Harold Bell Wright. He spent the next fifty years in the American West, and when he died he left behind a legacy of epic stories about the Ozarks, California, and Arizona.

Caroline Lockhart, Norris Yates

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

When Caroline Lockhart traveled the mere four blocks to her editorial office at the Cody, Wyoming Enterprise, she often rode horseback and wore boots, spurs, and a Stetson. “Clumping and jingling” (Boyett 21 Aug. 1989: A-10), she played in person the two roles she consistently projected in her fiction: exemplar of how a woman with courage, will power, and initiative could attain goals traditionally reserved for men, and preserver of what she considered the most admirable and picturesque elements of Old West culture. During her long and eventful life, she pioneered as a woman reporter, crusaded as an editor, …

William Allen White, Diane Dufva Quantic

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

William Allen White was inevitable in Kansas: someone who epitomized the central nature of the region was bound to appear. White s career in journalism, politics, and literature reflects the radical changes in the American West between the Civil War and World War II. At the same time, his life reflects mainstream American values. Centrifugal forces that originated in his acquaintance with state and national people and events drew him East, but centripetal forces drew him back to Emporia: the newspaper business, his family, his genuine commitment to the town itself. Although his attempts to balance these varied interests produced …

Ann Zwinger, Peter Wild

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

At Constant Friendship, the Zwingers' hideaway in the Colorado Rockies, daughter Sara lounges on the raft in the middle of the lake. In the meadow, her sister Jane chases butterflies, while the family’s German shepherd, Graf, romps at her heels. Susan is off hiking in the surrounding forest. Meanwhile, the girls' father, a pilot retired from the Air Force, manfully hammers away on his latest building project. Nearby, his wife sits at her ease, sketching a plant she brought back from this morning’s stroll, then rushes to the spotting scope to identify a strange bird circling the pines.

Peggy Pond Church, Shelley Armitage

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Peggy Pond Church wrote one of the best-selling nonfiction books in University of New Mexico Press history, The House at Otowi Bridge (1959). Nevertheless, she was chiefly a poet. Critics of Southwestern and Western letters generally have praised her exceptional talents, citing not only her steady maturing ear, but her polished forms and regional voice. She published eight volumes of poetry during her life and was honored in 1984 with the New Mexico Governor's Award for Literature. Fifty years before, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant prophesied in The Saturday Review of Literature that here was “a pristine young poetess . . . …

Ishmael Reed, Jay Boyer

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Ishmael Reed's beginnings as a writer can be traced to the East, to New York and New Jersey. Born in 1938, he attended the University of Buffalo. Then, after supporting himself through a series of temporary jobs, he found an apartment in New York City’s Hell's Kitchen district, went to work for the Newark Advance, set about writing his first novel, The Free-Lance Pallbearers, and published the first of his poetry in national anthologies.

Winston M. Estes, Bob J. Frye

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Winston Estes is a regional writer. His published and unpublished fiction, with few exceptions, focuses on the Southwest—Texas in particular. In November 1973 his fourth book, A Simple Act of Kindness (1973), received the Southwest Fiction Award from the Border Regional Library Association in El Paso. Among his hundreds of unpublished letters is one of 21 September 1970 to P.G. Wodehouse. After thanking Wodehouse for his kind remarks about Estes's first novel, Another Part of the House (1970), Estes notes that he is about to finish his next book: “It, too, has a Texas setting. I’ve spent years trying to …

Bess Streeter Aldrich, Abigail Ann Martin

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

“Nebraska,” wrote Bess Streeter Aldrich, “is only the state of my adoption, but I am sure that I feel all the loyalty for it which the native-born bears . . . while I am not a native Nebraskan, the blood of the midwestern pioneer runs in my veins and I come rightly by my love for the Nebraska pioneer and admiration for the courage and fortitude which he displayed in the early days of the state s history ...” (Introduction to The Rim of the Prairie).

William Humphrey, Mark Royden Winchell

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Unlike Europeans, Americans inhabit a vast land with a short history. For that reason, we have always tended to mythologize our experience in terms of space rather than time. In his essay “Boxing the Compass,” Leslie Fiedler even goes so far as to argue that American Literature can be broken down into regional subgenres—the Northern, Southern, Eastern, and Western. Most readers, however, would recognize only two of these categories. Whether or not there is such a thing as an “Eastern” or a “Northern,” the South and the West clearly have been ahead—or perhaps behind—the rest of the country in cherishing …

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 …

James D. Houston, Jonah Raskin

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Wallace Stegner defined one of the dilemmas facing the Western American regional writer when he observed, “The moment we segregate a writer and put the tag ‘Western’ on him we have implicitly downgraded him into some secondary category. If he's a writer we truly admire, we more often than not forget the regional limitation and think of him simply as a contemporary writer” (Stegner and Etulain 137). James D. Houston—a student of Stegner's at Stanford University and a long-time admirer of Stegner's work—has wrestled with this dilemma and has expressed a deep-seated ambivalence about his own identity and place as …