Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Caroly Ryrie Brink, Mary E. Reed

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

For a gifted storyteller with the ability to pluck the extraordinary from the ordinary, the occasion of Carol Ryrie Brink’s birth would give her the opportunity to introduce herself into a particular place and time. Her life tentatively began on 28 December 1895. She grew up hearing the story of that winter evening from her grandmother until it became her own. Her grandfather, Dr. William W. Watkins, arrived at the Ryries' house on a sleigh pulled through the snow by his high-stepping horse. As the doctor pumped the baby’s small arms up and down and blew his tobacco-scented breath into …

Alvar Núñez Cabeza De Vaca, Peter Wild

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Recounting his adventures on an unknown continent, Cabeza de Vaca passes on a story he heard in an Indian village:
They said that a little man wandered through the region whom they called Badthing [Mala Cosa]. He had a beard and they never saw his features distinctly. When he came to a house, the inhabitants trembled and their hair stood on end. A blazing brand would suddenly shine at the door as he rushed in and seized whom he chose, deeply gashing him in the side with a very sharp flint two palms long and a hand wide. …

Lawerence Clark Powell, Gerald Haslam

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Passion is the trait that most marks the varied careers of Lawrence Clark Powell. Not blind passion, of course, but as innovative librarian, as educator, as scholar, as critic, and as novelist, he has proceeded with an ardor that stands out: this son of the Southwest cares. Little is merely perfunctory or abstract in Powell’s work.

Matt Braun, Robert L. Gale

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Matthew Braun is a successful author of Western novels and criticism of Western fiction. He was bom outside Elk City, Oklahoma, in 1932. His family tree includes hunters, settlers, ranchers, stock inspectors, and members of the Cherokee tribe. From his early years Matt Braun associated with Cherokee and Osage Indians. During World War II, while his father was in the U.S. Navy and his mother worked at an army base, Braun went to a military academy in Bartlesville. After attending another academy at Claremore, he enrolled in a junior college, then graduated from Florida State University in 1954, with a …

George Wharton James, Peter Wild

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

The teenager mouthing poems before a mirror in an English industrial town would go on to enthrall overflow audiences at the San Diego Exposition of 1916. Away from the podium, he would earn large reputations as an anthropologist, explorer, social reformer, and booster of his adopted land. Along the way, he picked up some smudges: accusations of lying, of questionable tactics in selfpromotion, and of heinous sexual acts. Above all, he would write, producing much curious froth, such as The Story of Captain: The Horse with the Human Brain. The title alone shows how far George Wharton James would …

Dee Brown, Lyman B. Hagen

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

In 1974, Choice magazine voiced a widely held opinion when it characterized Dee A. Brown as “a distinguished writer of Western history” (284). By then he had also become known to a wide audience as a first-rate storyteller. Yet prior to the publication in 1970 of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, he had labored in relative obscurity, athough writing a steady stream of novels, articles, and historical reference books. Then the success and acceptance of Bury My Heart lifted him to national prominence.

Paula Gunn Allen, Elizabeth I. Hanson

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

“The breed is an Indian who is not an Indian.”
Paula Gunn Allen, “A Stranger in My Own Life”

At the center of Paula Gunn Allen’s vision of self and art is an individual alienated within. For Allen the idea of the “breed” reflects a preoccupation with alienation as a personal and as an aesthetic experience. Allen’s biography, her understanding of Native American literature, and her works of art and criticism are informed by the consciousness that “breeds” are aliens to traditional Native Americans and yet also aliens among whites. To know Allen’s life and work is to reflect deeply …

Tony Hillerman, Fred Erisman

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Readers quickly discover that there are three Tony Hillermans. One is the reporter, the streetwise observer of all the grandeur and all the depravity of the human race. Another is the storyteller, the person who sees in life’s events an endless source of entertainment. The third is the Southwestemer, a native of the region acutely aware of the locale’s complex uniqueness and the strata of human history that it embraces. All three personae merge in Hillerman’s writings, placing him solidly in the veritistic tradition established almost a century ago by Hamlin Garland. Writing in Crumbling Idols (1894), Garland calls for …

David Wagoner, Ron Mcfarland

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Writing for Mademoiselle in the spring of 1971, David Wagoner described his introduction to the Northwest as an ordeal lasting some five minutes. He had grown up in Whiting, Indiana, where his father had worked as a smelter at the steel mills in the industrial wasteland between Gary, Indiana, and Chicago, Illinois. Those images from his childhood are recorded in his first collection of poems, Dry Sun, Dry Wind (1953), and in five novels which are centered in the urban Midwest. But in 1971 the forty-five-year-old poet and novelist could speak not as a Midwesterner, but as a Westerner: “I …

Joseph Wood Krutch, Paul N. Pavich

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Joseph Wood Krutch’s first encounter with the West was a turning point in his life. In his autobiography, More Lives Than One, he says, “No sooner were we speeding along the roller coaster road which leads across the undulating desert towards Albuquerque than I felt a sudden lifting of the heart. It seemed almost as though I had lived there in some happier previous existence and was coming back home” (308). This sense of being at home was to lead him to abandon his academic life at Columbia University as well as his position as prominent critic of the …

David Henry Hwang, Douglas Street

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

I am much better now .... My parents—they don’t know nothing about the world, about watching Benson at the Roxy, . . . downshifting onto the Ventura Freeway at midnight. They’re yellow ghosts and they’ve tried to cage me up with Chinese-ness when all the time we were in America. So, I’ve had to work real hard—real hard—to be myself. To not be a Chinese, a yellow, a slant, a gook. To be just a human being, like everyone else. I’ve paid my dues. And that’s why I am much better now. I’m making it, you know? I’m making it …

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 …

D'Arcy Mcnickle, James Ruppert

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

A man of many talents, D’Arcy McNickle was noted as a public official, historian, Indian Rights advocate, and novelist. Through his writing and years of tireless public and personal service, McNickle influenced the history of white/Indian interaction, an interaction which was the focus of his energies and intellect. Today many scholars consider him to be the grandfather of Modern Native American Literature and Modern Native American Ethnohistory.

Kenneth Rexroth, Lee Bartlett

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

In his introduction to a festschrift for Kenneth Rexroth, Geoffrey Gardner points out that “one of the great paradoxes of Rexroth’s enormously paradoxical career is that his widest reputation is for being the promoter of some vaguely defined avant garde of which he is also a member.” This is both true and unfortunate: true because Rexroth has done much to aid younger writers through the years (he was a presiding figure over at least two important “movements” in contemporary writing—the first San Francisco Renaissance of the forties, which brought attention to writers like Robert Duncan, William Everson, Philip Lamantia, and …

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 …

Ernest Haycox, Richard W. Etulain

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

In the mid-1950s noted journalist and historian Bernard De Voto referred to novelist Ernest Haycox (1899-1950), as “the old pro of horse opera,” the writer who “came closer than anyone else to making good novels” of the popular Western. Haycox, continued De Voto, “left his mark—I should say brand—on the style as well as the content of the Western” (14). In the nearly two generations since Haycox’s death many other commentators on the Old West as well as several writers of Westerns have agreed with De Voto in assigning Ernest Haycox a pivotal role in the development of the fictional …

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 …

Helen Hunt Jackson, Rosemary Whitaker

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Amherst, Massachusetts, is noted as the birthplace of Emily Dickinson, universally recognized as one of America’s finest poets. Yet in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Amherst was better known as the birthplace of Helen Hunt Jackson, who had been a childhood friend of Emily Dickinson’s and had become a prominent writer while Dickinson remained in obscurity. Emily and Helen were two of the “Amherst girls,” an unusual group of offspring of Amherst College faculty, administrators, and trustees. One of the group, Emily Fowler, who acquired some brief notice as an author, wrote about her youth, “There was a …

Lanford Wilson, Mark Busby

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Vincent, the main character in Lanford Wilson’s first Broadway play, The Gingham Dog, explains that he left his small Kentucky town for New York because he was “sick of small peopleambitions—hopes—small hopelessness,” and he thought that New Yorkers “could comprehend something outside themselves, respond.” It was perhaps a similar attraction that brought Lanford Wilson from a small farm near Ozark, Missouri, to the bright lights of the Great White Way, but just as Vincent eventually discovers, Wilson learned that continuing connections with one’s region remain. He also knows that coming home is not always wrapped in comfortable nostalgia. Nonetheless, …

Elmer Kelton, Lawrence Clayton

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Although Elmer Kelton is well known as a livestock journalist, he has produced twenty-six novels in which—with two exceptions—he has chronicled the settlement of the Texas frontier. He begins his study with the days of early settlement by Anglos in the Stephen F. Austin Colony in southeast Texas and includes the war with Mexico, the Civil War, and the burgeoning of the cattle kingdom. He ends his Texas saga in the modem period with an aging rancher battling drought and federal bureaucracy.

Simon Ortiz, Andrew Wiget

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

The emergence of a contemporary literature written in English by Native Americans has forced yet another reassessment of what constitutes a “Western American” literature. That Native American writers like Leslie Silko, N. Scott Momaday, and James Welch have been well-received both by academe and the mass market suggests on the one hand that these Native American writers have a good deal in common with Anglo-American literary traditions, both canonical and popular. On the other hand, the fact that they can be identified as “Native American” because of their preoccupation with particular themes or attitudes toward their art suggests that there …

John Nichols, Peter Wild

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Liza Minnelli leaps into most people’s minds at the mention of The Sterile Cuckoo. Starring in the film released by Paramount in 1969, she played a teenager at turns vivacious and vulnerable, always intriguingly unpredictable. Even now, much of the public retains the image of endearing, if somewhat fey, co-ed Minnelli bubbling through the bittersweet adventures of a campus love affair. Her performance, perhaps more than the novel of the same title published four years earlier, launched John Nichols’ career by ingratiating the author with an American audience easily spellbound by youthful verve.

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 Everson, Lee Bartlett

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

No modern poet has been more dedicated to the American West as both place and idea than William Everson. From his first chapbook. These Are the Ravens (1935), to his most recent full-length volume of poetry. Masks of Drought (1981), and his prose meditations, Birth of a Poet (1982), Everson has asked us again and again to understand the power of what he calls the “archetype of the West": “the Western writer stands as term of the American impulse, and as term he constitutes its mainstream rather than a merely peripheral and incidental relevance” (Archetype West 147). While during …

Charles Sealsfield, Walter Grünzweig

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

The death of an aging, terminally ill American in the small city of Solothurn, Switzerland, on 26 May 1864, did not receive much public attention at first. Charles Sealsfield had lived on his small estate for some six years and was generally regarded as an eccentric, a writer who had known fame in his earlier days but who had long since resigned himself to a peaceful existence in Switzerland, one of the few non-autocratic countries in Europe at that time. To everyone’s surprise, however, the execution of his last will revealed that the old writer was not born in Pennsylvania, …

Robert Cantwell, Merrill Lewis

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Robert Emmett Cantwell died at seventy in New York City on 8 December 1978 with his roots in the Pacific Northwest unacknowledged and his varied career as a professional writer still largely unrecognized and unaccounted for. The career that started with the publication of a short story, "Hang by My Thumbs,” in 1929 and included the publication of two highly regarded novels, Laugh and Lie Down in 1931 and The Land of Plenty in 1934, seemed to have receded into obscurity.

John Haines, Peter Wild

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

The sun shines dully through the winter gray for a few hours, then pitches feebly down. Blackness creeps back to cover the frozen forest stretching for hundreds of miles in every direction. Through the psychotically long night the temperature moves down toward thirty, forty, maybe fifty, degrees or more below zero. Central Alaska is a grim place.

Western American Literary Criticism, Martin Bucco

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

The Westward Movement carried with it much of the transatlantic and colonial heritage. In 1758 almanac-maker Nathaniel Ames prophetically remarked: “So Arts and Sciences will change the Face of Nature in their Tour from Hence over the Appalachian Mountains to the Western Ocean." This conviction J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur also upheld in his Letters from an American Farmer (1782). Of course, most frontier folk preferred practical education, many even attributing book lamin’ to Old Nick. Still, from the beginning there was Western literary criticism—notions, talk, jottings about Western themes, Western writings, Western writers.

Barry Lopez, Peter Wild

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

In 1685, the people of Ansbach, Germany, chased a wolf. After finally killing it, they dressed the dead animal as a man, fixed a human mask to the carcass, then strung it up in the town square. Two hundred and ninety years later, Edward Abbey, a part-time forest ranger, writer, and self-styled hermit, wrote The Monkey Wrench Gang (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1975). In his picaresque novel, a merry band of malcontents roars over the mountains and through the canyons of the American Southwest on midnight forays. They burn down signs advertising real estate and pour Karo syrup into the …