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Western Writers Series Digital Editions

1984

Articles 1 - 3 of 3

Full-Text Articles in American Studies

Western American Literary Criticism, Martin Bucco Jan 1984

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 Jan 1984

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 …


William Saroyan, Edward Halsey Foster Jan 1984

William Saroyan, Edward Halsey Foster

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

What is there still to say about William Saroyan? Was he, after all, primarily a writer of his time—whom we read mainly to recover a sense of what his generation enjoyed? Was he, finally, as many have insisted, an entertainer, pleasant to read but easy to forget?