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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Laura Ingalls Wilder, Fred Erisman
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
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
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
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, …