American Literature Commons^™

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.

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, …

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.

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 …

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.” …

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 …

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.

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.

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 …

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 …

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 …

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.

Gertrude Atherton, Charlotte S. Mcclure

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Gertrude Atherton's story-chronicle of old Spanish and new American California appeared at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of her sixty-year-long career. Eighteen of her thirty-four novels, three of her four collections of short stories, and all three of her histories drew their inspiration from California, covering the area in the years from the 1800’s through the 1930's.

John G. Neihardt, Lucile F. Aly

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

In the literature celebrating the rugged spirit and tenacious optimism of the American West, John G. Neihardt, a Nebraska poet, raised one of the most vigorous voices. It sounds in his lyrics and rings through his epic masterwork, A Cycle of the West, in blended notes of wonder at the universe and deeper strains of human sorrow. His inspiration came from what he called the “glorious experience of living."

Bill Nye: The Western Writings, David B. Kesterson

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Though closely identified with the American West, Edgar Wilson Nye was born in the East and lived most of his life in the Midwest and South. Born in Shirley, Maine, on August 25, 1850, the eldest son of Franklin and Elizabeth Mitchell (Loring) Nye, Edgar was to remain a New Englander for only two years. As his future friend and lecture partner James Whitcomb Riley would later write in a comic account of Nye’s life, “At two years of age he took his parents by the hand, and, telling them that Piscataquis County was no place for them, he boldly …

Hamlin Garland: The Far West, Robert Gish

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Hamlin Garland is regarded today with both condescension and respect. His Middle-Western writings, the early and later phases of his work, are more highly regarded than are the Far-Western writings of his middle phase. The cause of this unevenness in the Garland canon can be traced to his attraction to history and story, propaganda and art, Realism and Romanticism. The boundaries of fiction and non-fiction contract and expand throughout Garland’s work, just as in his life he trailed and back-trailed from the Midwest to the East and West. In this sense Garland’s writing is inseparably autobiographical and regional; and his …

Jack Schaefer, Gerald Haslam

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

In 1945 Jack Schaefer, then a Norfolk, Virginia, newspaper editor, decided to write a story “to prove that there is no reason why an attempt cannot be made to create literature about the west as about the east or the south or any place anywhere.” He set his story in a Wyoming valley torn by conflict between pioneer farmers and a resident cattle baron trying to retain the open range. Then he introduced a palladin figure called Shane.

Frederic Remington, Fred Erisman

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

To an entire generation of readers, Frederic Remington was the spokesman for the American West. For almost a quarter of a century, from 1886 until his death in 1909, his drawings and paintings, published in Harper’s Weekly, The Century, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Collier’s, and other large-circulation magazines of the time, gave to many readers their only glimpses of Western life and the western landscape. The popular acclaim for his work was echoed by the American art establishment. During his lifetime, Remington was elected to membership in the National Academy of Design and awarded an honorary Bachelor of Fine Arts …

Stewart Edward White, Judy Alter

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

"I never go anywhere for material,” Stewart Edward White once told an interviewer. "If I did, I should not get it. ... I go places merely because for one reason or another, they attract me. Then, if it happens that I get close enough to the life, I may later find that I have something to write about. A man rarely writes anything convincing unless he has lived the life; not with his critical faculty alert but wholeheartedly and because, for the time being, it is his life” (Overton, When Winter Comes to Main Street, p. 64).

White, a …

Zane Grey, Ann Ronald

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

No one knows how many words Zane Grey wrote for publication, but the estimates vary between five million and nine million. No one knows how many copies of his novels have been sold, but the number must be well over forty million. No one knows how many different languages his novels have been translated into, or how many copies of those translations have been sold, but again, the figures must be high. Ultimately, no one knows how large an audience Zane Grey’s novels have reached, either directly or through serialization and reprint, as well as through movies and television. One …

George Frederick Ruxton, Neal Lambert

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

In the spring of 1847 at Fort Leavenworth on the Indian frontier a group of United States Dragoons stood staring at a remarkable frontier figure with a “Mahogany-coloured face” and dressed in “the pride of fringed deerskin and porcupine quills.” The costume was creating "no little difference of opinion amongst the troopers” as to which Indian tribe the figure might belong to.

Washington Irving: The Western Works, Richard H. Cracroft

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Early in the fall of 1832, while steaming down the Ohio River toward its confluence with the Mississippi, the steamboat Illinois, en route to St. Louis, collided with the Yellowstone with such force that the Illinois was nearly sunk. The accident, though minor, has symbolic value in a study of Washington Irving as a Western writer, for Irving was aboard the Illinois, traveling toward Independence, Missouri, where the famous author would begin a month-long tour on the prairies of Oklahoma—the Southwest. Aboard the Yellowstone, a packet belonging to the American Fur Company, were fur traders and trappers …

H.L. Davis, Robert Bain

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

“Ex-Cowboy's Novel Wins Harper Prize" announced the New York Times in August of 1935 when H. L. Davis’ Honey in the Horn won the $7,500 Award. Davis received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1936 and established himself nationally as a Western writer of talent and consequence. During the next twentyfour years, he published seven books—four more novels, a collection of poems which he had written between 1919 and 1933, a volume of stories and sketches which had been published in magazines between 1929 and 1941, and a series of essays about the Northwest.

Frederick Manfred, Joseph M. Flora

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Alan Swallow has designated Frederick Manfred, along with other writers of the American West, a maverick. The mavericks are serious writers who have pursued their themes without much recognition from the Eastern press, partly, Swallow felt, because the Eastern press has not understood the Western themes or techniques or has been too contemptuous to make the effort. The truth of Swallow’s contention of prejudice is difficult to assess. But there is, in any event, a group of Western writers who have gone on—sometimes with little recognition—pursuing their themes, meditating on the West, writing their books. Alan Swallow was friend to …

Walter Van Tilburg Clark, L. L. Lee

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

In October 1950, Walter Van Tilburg Clark said of The Track of the Cat that it was "another step forward in my constant effort to personalize the land and put the human tragedy back into its natural setting" (N.Y. Herald Tribune Book Review, Oct. 8, 1950, p. 18). Here, in a few precise words, is the essence of Clark's intention and of his vision, for his work, as different as his novels and his short _ stories might be from one another on the surface, was built upon· that simple and yet intricate vision of man in relationship …

Bret Harte, Patrick Morrow

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Bret Harte is well known as the first internationally famous writer of short stories about the West. “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” “The Outcasts of Poker Flat," and “Tennessee’s Partner,” all published in the late 1860's, earned Harte the recognition of the nation's popular audience and approval by Emerson, Lowell, Longfellow, Howells, and other leading literary men of the day. In 1870 Harte, then editor of the San Francisco-based Overland Monthly, published “Plain Language from Truthful James,” better known as “The Heathen Chinee.” Hawked on the street corners, endlessly reprinted, the poem created a national sensation. Soon afterwards, Harte …