American Literature Commons^™

Abigail Scott Duniway, Debra Shein

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

In 1895, as she launched a new journal dedicated to bringing equal rights to all the women of America, Abigail Scott Duniway had already been a key figure in the national woman’s movement for over two decades. And during those years, dramatic changes had been taking place. As she wrote, “though ‘Liberty for all the inhabitants of the land’ has not yet been secured, we have made much permanent progress, and now nobody doubts our ultimate success” (“Salutatory” PE 16 Aug. 1895). At the beginning of Duniway’s career, women’s rights were severely restricted. With few exceptions, marriage brought an end …

Frank Chin, John Charles Goshert

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Born in Berkeley in 1940, Frank Chin lived in the Motherlode country of California’s Sierra foothills during the Second World War before returning to the San Francisco Bay Area. He attended the University of California at Berkeley as an English major, but was drawn away to work for railroad companies throughout the west. Such early experiences of movement and transience would provide the foundations for the shifting settings of much of his drama, fiction, and criticism that would follow; additionally, this transience would also underlie the complex tone, treatment, and perception of Asian American identity that characterizes his work and …

William Kittredge, Ron Mcfarland

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Equally at home whether speaking before the Humanities Colloquium at Cedar City, Utah, the Nature Conservancy at Bend, Oregon, the Regional Newswriting Colloquium at Salt Lake City, or the Wyoming Outdoor Council at Sheridan, William (Bill) Kittredge has emerged over the past thirty years as one of the most prolific and outspoken exponents of the New West. He has edited or co-edited seven anthologies ranging in nature from Great Action Stories (1977) and Stories into Film (1979) to the monumental Montana compilation, The Last Best Place (1988) and The Portable Western Reader (1997). He is the author of two notable …

Reading Louis L'Amour's Hondo, Joseph Mills

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

I don't give a damn what anyone else thinks, I know it’s literature and I know it will be read 100 years from now.
—Louis L'Amour on his work (Jackson 168)

In 1946, publisher and editor Leo Margulies invited Louis L’Amour to a party in New York. Each of them had a problem. L’Amour, having served in the Army during World War II, had recently returned to the States to discover the pulp fiction markets in which he had established himself as a writer were changing. In the 1930s, he had sold numerous adventure, sports, and detective stories to magazines …

New Formalist Poets Of The American West, April Linder

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

In the late 1970s and early eighties, when most American poets were writing autobiographical free-verse lyrics, a handful of mavericks flouted literary fashion. They used rhyme, meter, and regular form—both traditional and innovative—and tried narrative, satire, and light verse. In an essay entitled “Can Poetry Matter?” (1991) one of these poets, Dana Gioia, accused contemporary poets of writing mostly for each other. “The poetry boom has been a distressingly confined phenomenon,” he wrote. “Decades of public and private funding have created a large professional class for the production of teachers, graduate students, editors, publishers, and administrators. Based mostly in universities, …

Gretel Ehrlich, Gregory L. Morris

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

As a Western writer, Gretel Ehrlich is something of a curious case. By birth a Californian, Ehrlich has nevertheless shaped her identity as a Western writer by experience gathered elsewhere in the West. At the same time, while Ehrlich has lived and written extensively about her life in north-central Wyoming—and built her considerable reputation upon that work—the arc of her experience has carried her for the moment back to her native California. This movement from place to place (Ehrlich has been a writer of many places in her career) suggests a dominant tension in her life and work: that of …

Desert Literature: The Early Period, Peter Wild

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Although not entirely free, ours is a fairly easy ride when it comes to living on deserts. Today, in order to survive, few people out in the lands of the giant cactus and the Gila monster eat grasshoppers or spend day after day hoeing beans in the punishing 110° heat. Instead, today’s residents enjoy a created world of air-conditioned homes, schools, and shopping malls. The point is that few people live in the desert anymore. They live on it. Theirs is a colonial society, imposed on the land, fed from the outside, and infused with the life-giving juice of energy …

Reading Wallace Stegner's Angle Of Repose, Russell Burrows

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Wallace Stegner must have felt he was gambling as he settled on Angle of Repose (1971) as the title for his most important novel—the one that would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize (1972). “Angle of repose” happens to be a bit of technical jargon from mining, and Stegner meant to extend it to marriage. This unlikely metaphor begins with the practical understanding that mine debris will tumble downhill only so far, because as a slope levels out, the rocks and the gravels and the like will start to pile up at their respective “angles of repose.” And so, …

Desert Literature: The Modern Period, Peter Wild

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Today’s desert writing is so diffuse, ranging from detective novels to spiritual guides, that it would seem impossible to make much sense of this popular genre. However, if we put it in context, looking at the changing attitudes toward deserts over the sweep of the years and at the books growing out of them, what at first appears an impenetrable welter begins to make sense.

Dana Gioia, April Linder

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

The poet Dana Gioia is a pivotal figure in contemporary American letters. One of the most respected and vocal writers identified with the controversial movement commonly called the New Formalism, Gioia has helped to redefine the face of contemporary poetry. In his 1991 Atlantic Monthly essay, “Can Poetry Matter?” Gioia critiqued the American poetry scene, arguing that contemporary poets were writing mainly for an audience of other poets. He claimed that because poets weren’t trying to reach a general audience, contemporary poetry generally was going unread by non-poets, even by college graduates who regularly read novels. Gioia blamed the loss …

Reading A.B. Guthrie's The Big Sky, Fred Erisman

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Shortly after midday on 31 August 1837, thirty-four-year-old Ralph Waldo Emerson stepped before the Harvard chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society in Cambridge, Massachusetts, preparing to give the annual oration associated with the university’s commencement exercises. In the audience, in addition to some two hundred students, were such luminaries as the physician-essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Abolitionist Wendell Phillips, the poet James Russell Lowell, and the governor of Massachusetts, Edward Everett, who later became president of Harvard. Emerson’s presentation, entitled “The American Scholar,” lasted for slightly more than an hour (Richardson 261-63).

Narrow Way To Nearby, David Robertson

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Rain was the forcast. Rain was in the air. Rain was on the ground in puddles. Ecotourist drove east through the morning drizzle in his new black Honda down Old Davis Road to California Fish and Game. After he was pasted with a name tag and scanned for metal, he boarded the bus for a slow ride to an island of mud in the middle of Yolo Bypass. Fences kept invited guests apart from an impromptu stage. Bleachers for the press rimmed the perimeter. Reporters in raincoats slouched near their cameras covered in plastic. A big wooden sign anchored with …

Reading Willa Cather's The Song Of The Lark, Evelyn Funda

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

When Willa Gather sent her publisher the manuscript for The Song of the Lark in March 1915, she wrote him that unless he had lived in the West, he couldn’t possibly understand how much of the region she had put into the novel. It expressed the “My country, ’tis of thee” feeling that the West always gave her, and, she concluded, when she grew old and couldn’t explore the desert anymore, all she need do to recapture the sense of place would be to lift the lid of the novel (Willa Gather to Ferris Greenslet, March 28, 1915—I paraphrase here …

Desert Literature: The Middle Period - J. Smeaton Chase, Edna Brush Perkins, And Edwin Corle, Peter Wild

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Whether through religion, sex, or art, people crave excitement, to be elevated above ordinary experiences. A frequent theme both in our lives and in literature, this desire often involves the interplay of fantasy and reality. Is Hamlet indeed mad—does he actually see camels in the clouds—or is he quite coolly calculating, shrewdly manipulating people? For our part, when we fall in love, are we being led yet again by our delusions toward disaster?

Ivan Doig, A. Carl Bredahl

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

The big sky of the American West has the striking effect of focusing the viewer’s attention on both land and sky. On America’s Great Plains and High Desert, the sky dominates, forcing the eye away from the traditional Judeo-Christian vertical orientation and toward the horizon, generating a remarkable sense of balance. American Western narrative carries this story of balance and possibility. The Westerner finds himself accepting the landscape, indeed drawing upon it for physical and spiritual sustenance. Even the most imposing of surfaces—the landscape of eastern Utah or of the Dakota badlands—share a vulnerability with man as evidenced by erosion, …

Alberto Ríos, Peter Wild

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Caught up in the current cultural ferment involving race, sex, and ethnic identity, people tend to forget. The all-time best-selling novel in the nineteenth-century United States was an antislavery book written by a woman, and in the 1920s black writer W. E. B. Du Bois was widely celebrated by a large number of critics. Periodically over the course of the nation’s history, both as concerns the general culture and our literature specifically, what we today call minorities, and how we perceive them, have exerted huge influences, shaping much of our lives, from what we wear and eat to what we …

Joy Harjo, Rhonda Pettit

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Who is Joy Harjo? To anyone familiar with Native American writing and/or contemporary poetry, the obvious answer to this question might be: a Native American poet. Readers familiar with her work might also consider her a Western U. S. writer, since she lives in the Southwest and uses Western landscapes and locales as settings, as vehicles for psychological probing, and as subjects endowed with transcendent power. If these labels seem reductive, other cultural and literary locations Harjo occupies complicate the issue of her identity.

Reading Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing In America, Joseph Mills

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Last summer, I hiked along the Tomales Point trail in Point Reyes, a National Seashore, north of San Francisco. On my left was the Pacific Ocean, and on my right were fields that were once dairylands but are now a Tule elk preserve.

Vern Rutsala, Erik Muller

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

According to one version of regionalism, the poet readily draws from the experience of living in a particular place. The poet’s youthful books, like many first novels, depict the autobiography and the home scene. Later, the poet learns to generalize from the local or to abandon it altogether for a broader, more significant canvas. The poet progresses to writing about the universal.

Rick Bass, O. Alan Weltzien

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

In July 1992, Newsweek ran an article titled “Don’t Fence Them Out,” a piece that explores the Intermountain literary renaissance of the past few decades. The article includes a sidebar describing places where there are “Too many writers,” listing “Albuquerque,” “Portland,” and “All of Montana.” The same sidebar includes four titles under the heading “Books walking off the shelves out West (but good luck finding 'em back East).” One of those works listed is Rick Bass’s The Ninemile Wolves (1992), his sixth book. Bass’s career substantiates the prideful claim reflected in the title of Montana’s centennial literary anthology, The Last …

Frank Bergon, Gregory L. Morris

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

The story of Frank Bergon and of his fiction might well be said to begin with his grandparents. Bergon’s maternal grandparents—Esteban and Petra Mendive—both came to America, around the turn of the century, from the Basque region of Spain. His grandfather, born in Guernica, arrived first and eventually met his wife-to-be—a mail-order bride—at the train station in Salt Lake City. The two moved to Battle Mountain, Nevada, and there started a grocery and the Basque hotel; Bergon remembers, in fact, his grandmother operating the hotel until well into her eighties and well after her husband’s death. Esteban and Petra Mendive …

Bernard Devoto, Russell Burrows

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Bernard DeVoto spent the years of the Second World War hard at work on two books. Although very different from one another, both books happened to have Western settings, far from the home DeVoto had been making for himself and his family in Cambridge, Massachusetts. One of these books seemed to pour itself from him, mounting to 100,000 words, then swelling to 150,000, and rounding out at about 170,000. Its subject was the mountain fur trade, the larger-than-life stories of Jim Bridger, Kit Carson, Tom Fitzpatrick, Joe Meek, Chief Joseph, Black Hawk, and many other trappers and natives. Making the …

Laura Jensen, Dina Ben-Lev

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Poet and critic Tess Gallagher has described Laura Jensen as “the Einstein of the ordinary.” Just as Einstein's theories disrupted the then common-sense understanding of a universe governed by immutable laws, Jensen’s poems transform our view of the everyday things we take for granted, the ordinary birds and flowers we no longer notice. “Behind a poem is a bad intention / to make the reader worry deeply,” Jensen writes in “What Is Poetry?”, a poem from her first chapbook (After 16). Her poems “worry” us because they force us to confront our fear of the unpredictability of the world. …

Garrett Hongo, Laurie Filipelli

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Garrett Kongo’s poetic voice rises from cultural, historical, and personal memories. As a Yonsei (a fourth-generation Japanese American) born in Hawai i and raised largely in Los Angeles, his concerns span time and place, and his style links Asian and European traditions. He writes from the crowded trains and serene temples of his ancestral homeland, the lush jungles and active volcanoes of his birthplace, and the racial tension and dispossession of life in urban America, fitting the pieces together in a mosaic of self, family, and culture.

George Bird Grinnell, Robley Evans

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

As the United States frontier moved west in the nineteenth century, it developed as a locus for the myth of the American superman, a fabled combination of self-reliance and self-development in which the frontiersman fought savage beasts and wild Indians to push a great civilization through plains and forests to the Pacific Ocean. Ironically, to participate in the frontier’s expansion was to contribute to its destruction: as destiny and technology seemed to carry the nation toward its grand fulfillment, the wilderness with its challenging animals and murderous savages diminished. By the 1880s, thoughtful Americans believed that the West could no …

Richard Ronan, Jane Vanstavern

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

The new world, the new times, the new peoples, the new vistas, need a tongue according . . .
—Walt Whitman

Richard Louis Ronan was a poet, playwright, and ikebana flower designer who lived in San Francisco with his partner, Bill Pittman, during the 1980s. He died of AIDS in 1989 at age 43, having produced six collections of poetry, seven plays, and several unpublished manuscripts. He received not only a Dodge Foundation Grant to teach poetry but also, while studying at Berkeley, the Emily Cook and Eisner Prizes. His versatility did not prevent him from excelling in several poetic …

Janet Campbell Hale, Frederick Hale

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

In the early 1970s, at an early stage of the “Native American Renaissance,” a period that witnessed a recrudescence of tribal literary efforts, historical consciousness, and demands for civil rights, Janet Campbell Hale quietly began to make her mark on the Native American cultural landscape. A young member of the Coeur d’Alene tribe, she was then residing in the San Francisco area and had written a novel for adolescents titled The Owl’s Song, which inaugurated a noteworthy career in ethnic fiction and has gone through many printings. Like most other Native American authors, Hale has not been highly prolific …

Mark Medoff, Rudolf Erben

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Mark Medoff grew up in the East, lives in the New West, but dreams of the Old West. In his essay “Adios, Old West,” he nostalgically calls himself a “child of the Old West” (1). Medoffs protagonists likewise romanticize the Western American past because they associate it with their own youthful innocence. But they learn to live with the far less romantic realities of an increasingly eastemized West. Like Medoff, they know that cowboys can no longer be role models. While they regret the decline of the heroic tradition, they realize that they cannot emulate outdated stereotypes. In his drama, …

Jane Gilmore Rushing, Lou H. Rodenberger

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Jane Gilmore Rushing begins an article entitled “People and Place,” commissioned by The Writer (September 1969) after publication of her second novel, with this self-assessment: “I think I am what you call a regional writer.” Such candid acknowledgement by a writer of what she perceives her role to be in the literary world is rare. Most writers steer clear of the designation of “regionalist,” even those whose works convey a powerful sense of place. Nevertheless, Jane Rushing’s explanation of her authorial selfimage dispels any doubt that she does indeed see herself as a regionalist, whose mission is to share with …

Tess Gallagher, Ron Mcfarland

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

The voice of the poet may be one or polyvocal: bardic, prophetic, political, satiric, meditative, bucolic, sentimental, nostalgic. The voice of the poet may be deep or shallow, profound or silly, complex or easy, loud or soft. Nothing guarantees that we will like the work of any given poet except our own direct engagement with the poems. If some of our friends tell us we will like, or dislike, Tess Gallagher’s poems, it is probably because of something they know about us or about the poems themselves, and that something is most likely the voice they hear, whether consciously or …