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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
John C. Van Dyke: The Desert, Peter Wild
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
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
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
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
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 …