Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 5 of 5
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Tony Hillerman, Fred Erisman
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
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
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
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
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 …