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Articles 151 - 180 of 197

Full-Text Articles in American Literature

Charles Sealsfield, Walter Grünzweig Jan 1985

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, …

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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 …

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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.

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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?

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Richard Hugo, Donna Gerstenberger Jan 1983

Richard Hugo, Donna Gerstenberger

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Of the Pacific Northwest’s four major modern poets—Richard Hugo, Theodore Roethke, William Stafford, and David Wagoner—only Richard Hugo was born and reared in the region, a fact which significantly marks the experience of his poems. In fact, if one set out to imagine Northwest lives spanning the last sixty years, one of those imagined lives ought to look very much like Hugo’s, except, of course, that out of his life he made poetry.

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Sophus K. Winther, Barbara Howard Meldrum Jan 1983

Sophus K. Winther, Barbara Howard Meldrum

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Like Wallace Stegner, Sophus Keith Winther feels uncomfortable with the label “Western writer.” For Stegner, the label too often smacks of horse-opera: outworn myths that lacked historical basis to begin with. Winther’s objection has less to do with subject matter, more to do with theme and character: regionalism—whether Western or Southern, or Wessex—too often exploits superficial traits of a locality, whereas enduring literature reveals the universal drama of the human condition (“The Limits of Regionalism”). Stegner and Winther agree, however, that a writer should begin with what he or she knows best; if one’s experience is Western, then Western regionalism …

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Struthers Burt, Raymond C. Phillips Jr. Jan 1983

Struthers Burt, Raymond C. Phillips Jr.

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

If the pen is mightier than the sword, Maxwell Struthers Burt was a stalwart warrior. Poet, essayist, novelist, short story writer, librettist, reviewer, author of a literary manifesto, contributor to letter-to-the-editor columns, and personal letter writer, Burt seems never to have stopped writing over a career of a half-century. His principal publisher was Charles Scribner’s Sons, which, under the editorial leadership of Maxwell Perkins, published the work of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, and a variety of other respected writers. Burt’s articles, essays, poems, and stories appeared in many of the most successful magazines in America: Scribner's Magazine, …

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James Welch, Peter Wild Jan 1983

James Welch, Peter Wild

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

On their way to work, Americans hurried past disciples of Hare Krishna, orange-robed and seemingly from another planet, chanting in the streets. Home again that night they watched Neil Armstrong tread the lunar rubble, or they gaped at villages swelling up in instant clouds of napalm. In a land that idolized youth, college students were “trashing” their own campuses, while young blacks, in a strange counterpart to the war in far-off Asia, were setting fire to their own ghettos. The greatest scandal since Teapot Dome was about to give yet another violent shake to Americans’ confidence in who they were …

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Preston Jones, Mark Busby Jan 1983

Preston Jones, Mark Busby

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

When Preston Jones burst upon the national scene, it was like an unknown store clerk strapping on a .45 to take on the established gunslinger in the middle of the street. Suddenly Jones was famous. His picture appeared on the covers of Smithsonian and Saturday Review. He was the subject of a PBS television special. He was compared with Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill. (Saturday Review’s cover asked: “Has Texas Spawned a New O’Neill?”) His three plays, collectively titled A Texas Trilogy, enjoyed a great deal of success after they opened at the Dallas Theater Center …

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Horace Mccoy, Mark Royden Winchell Jan 1982

Horace Mccoy, Mark Royden Winchell

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Upon returning from Paris in 1946, Vogue editor Allene Talmey observed: “Everyone in the knowledgeable world talks about American writers, about a curious trinity: Hemingway, Faulkner, and McCoy” ("Paris Quick Notes/About Sartre, Gide, Cocteau, Politics,/The Theatre, and Inflation," Vogue, January 15, 1947, p. 92). Although he has long had an enthusiastic following overseas, the California novelist Horace McCoy (1897-1955) is virtually unknown in the United States. Here, all five of his novels are out of print and the published scholarship on those novels is minimal. Nevertheless, McCoy was a serious artist who helped extend the boundaries of the indigenously …

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Will Henry / Clay Fisher, Robert L. Gale Jan 1982

Will Henry / Clay Fisher, Robert L. Gale

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Henry Wilson Allen is a controversial and exciting Western author. He is also perhaps the most underrated, persistently overlooked of the major writers of the American West. He has used two pen names —"Clay Fisher" and "Will Henry" —and his own name in two forms (Henry Wilson Allen and Henry W. Allen) to sign a total of more than fifty books, almost all of them novels, from 1950 to the present.

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Mabel Dodge Luhan, Jane V. Nelson Jan 1982

Mabel Dodge Luhan, Jane V. Nelson

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Mabel Dodge Luhan is best known for her social affairs in Florence, New York City, and Taos, and for her remarkable ability to meet and court influential people such as Gertrude Stein, Isadora Duncan, John Reed, and D.H. Lawrence. Her activities in Taos, comprising the second half of her life, have attracted the most attention. There she married a Pueblo Indian and persuaded several writers and artists to visit her, helping to establish the basis for a lively community of artists. She is an acknowledged influence on such writers as Willa Gather, Mary Austin, D.H. Lawrence, and Frank Waters. In …

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Scandinavian Immigrant Literature, Christer Lennart Mossberg Jan 1981

Scandinavian Immigrant Literature, Christer Lennart Mossberg

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

When today’s "Midwest” opened to settlers in the nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of European immigrants joined Americans streaming into the area. Eventually, these immigrants constituted almost half the population of the plains and prairies. Although many old country habits and traditions disappeared quickly under the pressure to assimilate, several immigrant groups persisted in using their own languages to record their lives. Scandinavian immigrants left one of the richest records of Western farmlife in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, not only in their diaries, journals, and ethnic histories, but particularly in their literature. Over eighty novels and short story …

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George R. Stewart, John Caldwell Jan 1981

George R. Stewart, John Caldwell

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

When George Stewart's father, looking for better health and a new start, moved his family from western Pennsylvania to southern California, he placed them into the great stream of emigrants that crossed America in search of a better life in the West. This Western living experience has had a strong shaping influence upon George Stewart, both as a scholar and as a writer. Although his interests have been very broad, a major part of his work has been Western, centering on the San Francisco Bay area and the valleys, mountains, and plains that lead to it.

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Clarence King, Peter Wild Jan 1981

Clarence King, Peter Wild

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

“The young men were scattering in all directions,” says Van Wyck Brooks of the United States in the 1870s (New England: Indian Summer, 1865-1915, p. 184). Having survived the Civil War, the Union appeared vital in body and spirit. Railroads and telegraph lines spread across the country, binding the resource-rich territories of the American West with the rapidly industrializing East. Armed with the confidence that we now call "nineteenth-century optimism," and justified by what the Andrew Carnegies and John D. Rockefellers of the day thought of as "progress” shored by Social Darwinism, men scrambled for their share of nature’s …

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Benjamin Capps, Ernest B. Speck Jan 1981

Benjamin Capps, Ernest B. Speck

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

One might assume that a requisite for becoming a successful novelist about the Southwest is to be born in Archer County, Texas. Both Benjamin Capps and Larry McMurtry were born there, but their interests are different. Capps has been concerned with the background of his region, while McMurtry treats contemporary themes. Capps has now published eight novels, plus three pieces of non-fiction, about the West.

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Dorothy Johnson, Judy Alter Jan 1980

Dorothy Johnson, Judy Alter

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Although her work is primarily rooted in her home state of Montana, Dorothy Johnson was not born a Westerner. Her birthplace was a farm in McGregor, Iowa, a town in the heart of the Midwest. Born on December 19, 1905, she was christened Dorothy Marie Johnson and called Marie by friends and family until she went to college.

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Joaquin Miller, Benjamin S. Lawson Jan 1980

Joaquin Miller, Benjamin S. Lawson

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

When Joaquin Miller died in 1913, he had been conspicuous on the American literary scene for over forty years. Given to seeing his literary career as an analogue to the actual exploration and settling of the West, he conceived, enacted, and recorded an eventful life in which he himself figures most prominently. Miller had created a public image, which was probably a self-image as well, of himself as writer and as Westerner. His prose and poetry are sometimes marked by the romantic excesses of Byron or Swinburne; and his life and work include picturesque posings as the Wild Westerner. But …

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Janet Lewis, Charles L. Crow Jan 1980

Janet Lewis, Charles L. Crow

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Janet Lewis’s writing career has spanned nearly sixty years, long enough for her to reflect, were she interested in the subject, on the disparity between excellence and fame. She has published poetry, short stories, essays, children’s books, opera libretti, and novels. She has been praised by distinguished writers and critics, including Theodore Roethke and Donald Davie. Two of her novels, The Wife of Martin Guerre and The Trial of Soren Quist, have been hailed as masterpieces. She remains little known, however, even though she has a circle of enthusiastic admirers.

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C.L. Sonnichsen, Joyce Gibson Roach Jan 1979

C.L. Sonnichsen, Joyce Gibson Roach

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

El Paso is located at almost the farthest point of West Texas, where the Rio Grande River begins its sweep into the Big Bend country. Strangers find it a region extreme in its limitless supply of nothing. Even natives joke about the area. It is a place where “every living thing seems prepared to fight for its life. Even the plants go armed and hardly a shrub can be found without a spine or fang somewhere" (Roy Bean, p. 71). Texans do not expect a man from Minnesota with a Ph.D. from Harvard to write affectionately about the sand, …

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Ruth Suckow, Abigail Ann Hamblen Jan 1978

Ruth Suckow, Abigail Ann Hamblen

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

In her Memoir Ruth Suckow speaks of the small Iowa town where she was born as a place that looked ahead toward fresh beginnings. She describes other towns where she lived as older and more settled. But all of them, she implies, are dependent upon the sunshine, rains, and rich fields of the great farming region that is known as the Midwest, the Middle West, or Mid-America.

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Virginia Sorensen, L L. Lee, Sylvia B. Lee Jan 1978

Virginia Sorensen, L L. Lee, Sylvia B. Lee

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

“If you burrow for roots, it was the fault of my grandmother,” the protagonist of Virginia Sorensen’s novel The Man with the Key remarks. And although we must ignore the half-ironic reference to a fault—and remind ourselves that an author’s characters are not the author—this metaphor is an exact image of Virginia Sorensen’s world and of her works. Sorensen has published eight novels, most of them about the American West, as well as a number of short stories and a group of children’s books. Her roots are the very essence of almost all, and certainly of the best, of her …

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Alfred Henry Lewis, Abe C. Ravitz Jan 1978

Alfred Henry Lewis, Abe C. Ravitz

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

He was a cowboy and a lawyer, a journalist and a novelist. At ease passing the time of day with drifters in front of Melinda's House of Call at Watrous (Mora County) in the sparse territory of New Mexico or debating socio-economic philosophy with sophisticated Tammany politicians just outside City Hall in New York, Alfred Henry Lewis—Western regionalist and Eastern muckraker—was enchanted by America’s land of legend and myth beyond the frontier, and he forever glanced backward with nostalgia at his “pampas years,” when he roved "for many moons" between “the Canadian in the Panhandle and the Gila in Arizona.” …

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Don Berry, Glen A. Love Jan 1978

Don Berry, Glen A. Love

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

In his first two novels of the early Oregon country, Trask and Moontrap, Northwestern author Don Berry placed himself within what has come to be perhaps the essential tradition in serious Western American literature. Like such earlier writers as Willa Gather, Robinson Jeffers, and Walter Van Tilburg Clark, and like his contemporary fellow-Northwesterner Gary Snyder, Don Berry conveys to us a sacramental belief that transcendent power or energy awaits man’s explorations within the natural world. Further, Berry’s work asserts that this participation, this ultimate reconciliation with the patterns of earth and sky, water and rock, must be undertaken in …

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Charles Alexander Eastman (Ohiyesa), Marion W. Copeland Jan 1978

Charles Alexander Eastman (Ohiyesa), Marion W. Copeland

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Because Charles Eastman’s best known book is his earliest, Indian Boyhood (1902), and because that autobiography and its sequel, From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1916), have been most often used as sources for studies of the cultural transition of the Sioux, the literary value of those and of Eastman’s later books has gone largely unexamined. Eastman subtitled the 1916 volume The Autobiography of an Indian, but one cannot therefore assume that the conventions of European-American autobiography control Eastman’s work.

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Josiah Gregg And Lewis H. Garrard, Edward Halsey Foster Jan 1977

Josiah Gregg And Lewis H. Garrard, Edward Halsey Foster

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

New Mexico and that vast region spanned by the Santa Fe trail—a region utterly unlike anything east of the Mississippi—must have seemed enormously exotic and exciting to Americans a hundred and fifty years ago. It was a segment of the continent which most Americans knew only through books, and there were many of them, highly colored and occasionally inaccurate, to satisfy, or increase, their curiosity. American interest in the region expanded as the decades passed and culminated, of course, in the Mexican War and American possession of the Southwest.

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George Catlin, Joseph R. Millichap Jan 1977

George Catlin, Joseph R. Millichap

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

George Catlin, the first and best observer of the Plains Indians, died in 1872, impoverished and ignored. As America enters its third century as a nation, it seems that American history might have caught up with him. In the 1970’s Catlin at last is receiving the attention which is his due as an adventurer, as an anthropologist, and as an artist, both literary and graphic. His drawings, paintings, and lithographs are being shown in museums and libraries across the country; his most important book, Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs and Conditions of the North American Indians (1841) has …

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Charles Warren Stoddard, Robert L. Gale Jan 1977

Charles Warren Stoddard, Robert L. Gale

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Charles Warren Stoddard (1843-1909) was a personable San Francisco bohemian with a flair for precious poetics and a gift for describing Western and foreign locales. He became the friend of distinguished writers both regionally and internationally known, but he also became a self-indulging old sybarite who neglected his great literary talent. He is best known for his brilliant South-Sea Idyls, Mashallah!, The Lepers of Molokai, A Troubled Heart, In the Footprints of the Padres, The Island of Tranquil Delights, and several shorter works, and also for his friendship with such diverse personalities as Ina Coolbrith, Prentice Mulford, Mark Twain, Father …

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E.W. Howe, Martin Bucco Jan 1977

E.W. Howe, Martin Bucco

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Edgar Watson Howe’s quaint niche in American literary history rests squarely on his first and best novel, The Story of a Country Town (1882). In 1856 the infant Howe and his parents trekked West, "to grow up with the country.” But unlike the early work of Bret Harte, Edward Eggleston, and Mark Twain, Howe’s Country Town blasted the Jeffersonian garden with the raw winds of Darwinism and Necessity and stressed Western drabness and tragic failure. His early hardships on the land, in printshops, and at home informed both his grim fiction and his country-town journalism. Before he became celebrated in …

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Edward Abbey, Garth Mccann Jan 1977

Edward Abbey, Garth Mccann

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

To an assembly of professional historians meeting in Colorado in August 1974, Vine Deloria, Jr., complained that the accumulated bulk of research and writing dealing with the cowboy, cavalry, and fndian era of the American West stands in stark contrast to the dearth of attention paid by historians to what has happened since Wounded Knee. Everyone, apparently, knows all the cliches about the old West, but few know anything at all about the new West—about its history, its meaning, its place within developing American culture.

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