American Literature Commons^™

Theodore Strong Van Dyke, Peter Wild

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Few writers, no matter how popular in their day, can point to “firsts” in their literary careers. As to Theodore Strong Van Dyke, in the midst of the booming land sales of the 1880s, when trainloads of Midwesterners crowded into southern California to be fleeced by ready hucksters, Van Dyke sowed doubts about the direction which was applauded as progress. Particularly through his lightly sardonic novel Millionaires of a Day (1890), this friend of John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt initiated an American uneasiness that the hoopla over the region, and over the American West generally, was false, “. . . …

Thomas And Elizabeth Savage, Sue Hart

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Although Elizabeth Fitzgerald and Thomas Savage were born on opposite sides of the country, from early on it seemed as if they were as destined for each other as they were for careers in writing.

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.

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

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.

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, …

Ann Zwinger, Peter Wild

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

At Constant Friendship, the Zwingers' hideaway in the Colorado Rockies, daughter Sara lounges on the raft in the middle of the lake. In the meadow, her sister Jane chases butterflies, while the family’s German shepherd, Graf, romps at her heels. Susan is off hiking in the surrounding forest. Meanwhile, the girls' father, a pilot retired from the Air Force, manfully hammers away on his latest building project. Nearby, his wife sits at her ease, sketching a plant she brought back from this morning’s stroll, then rushes to the spotting scope to identify a strange bird circling the pines.

Ishmael Reed, Jay Boyer

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Ishmael Reed's beginnings as a writer can be traced to the East, to New York and New Jersey. Born in 1938, he attended the University of Buffalo. Then, after supporting himself through a series of temporary jobs, he found an apartment in New York City’s Hell's Kitchen district, went to work for the Newark Advance, set about writing his first novel, The Free-Lance Pallbearers, and published the first of his poetry in national anthologies.

Peggy Pond Church, Shelley Armitage

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Peggy Pond Church wrote one of the best-selling nonfiction books in University of New Mexico Press history, The House at Otowi Bridge (1959). Nevertheless, she was chiefly a poet. Critics of Southwestern and Western letters generally have praised her exceptional talents, citing not only her steady maturing ear, but her polished forms and regional voice. She published eight volumes of poetry during her life and was honored in 1984 with the New Mexico Governor's Award for Literature. Fifty years before, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant prophesied in The Saturday Review of Literature that here was “a pristine young poetess . . . …

William Allen White, Diane Dufva Quantic

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

William Allen White was inevitable in Kansas: someone who epitomized the central nature of the region was bound to appear. White s career in journalism, politics, and literature reflects the radical changes in the American West between the Civil War and World War II. At the same time, his life reflects mainstream American values. Centrifugal forces that originated in his acquaintance with state and national people and events drew him East, but centripetal forces drew him back to Emporia: the newspaper business, his family, his genuine commitment to the town itself. Although his attempts to balance these varied interests produced …

William Humphrey, Mark Royden Winchell

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Unlike Europeans, Americans inhabit a vast land with a short history. For that reason, we have always tended to mythologize our experience in terms of space rather than time. In his essay “Boxing the Compass,” Leslie Fiedler even goes so far as to argue that American Literature can be broken down into regional subgenres—the Northern, Southern, Eastern, and Western. Most readers, however, would recognize only two of these categories. Whether or not there is such a thing as an “Eastern” or a “Northern,” the South and the West clearly have been ahead—or perhaps behind—the rest of the country in cherishing …

Bess Streeter Aldrich, Abigail Ann Martin

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

“Nebraska,” wrote Bess Streeter Aldrich, “is only the state of my adoption, but I am sure that I feel all the loyalty for it which the native-born bears . . . while I am not a native Nebraskan, the blood of the midwestern pioneer runs in my veins and I come rightly by my love for the Nebraska pioneer and admiration for the courage and fortitude which he displayed in the early days of the state s history ...” (Introduction to The Rim of the Prairie).

Winston M. Estes, Bob J. Frye

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Winston Estes is a regional writer. His published and unpublished fiction, with few exceptions, focuses on the Southwest—Texas in particular. In November 1973 his fourth book, A Simple Act of Kindness (1973), received the Southwest Fiction Award from the Border Regional Library Association in El Paso. Among his hundreds of unpublished letters is one of 21 September 1970 to P.G. Wodehouse. After thanking Wodehouse for his kind remarks about Estes's first novel, Another Part of the House (1970), Estes notes that he is about to finish his next book: “It, too, has a Texas setting. I’ve spent years trying to …

Lawerence Clark Powell, Gerald Haslam

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Passion is the trait that most marks the varied careers of Lawrence Clark Powell. Not blind passion, of course, but as innovative librarian, as educator, as scholar, as critic, and as novelist, he has proceeded with an ardor that stands out: this son of the Southwest cares. Little is merely perfunctory or abstract in Powell’s work.

Caroly Ryrie Brink, Mary E. Reed

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

For a gifted storyteller with the ability to pluck the extraordinary from the ordinary, the occasion of Carol Ryrie Brink’s birth would give her the opportunity to introduce herself into a particular place and time. Her life tentatively began on 28 December 1895. She grew up hearing the story of that winter evening from her grandmother until it became her own. Her grandfather, Dr. William W. Watkins, arrived at the Ryries' house on a sleigh pulled through the snow by his high-stepping horse. As the doctor pumped the baby’s small arms up and down and blew his tobacco-scented breath into …

Jeanne Williams, Judy Alter

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Author of fifty books, all but two of them fiction, Jeanne Williams is a prolific and versatile novelist. She has over ten million books in print and has three times won the Spur Award for fiction from Western Writers of America and once the prestigious Levi Strauss Golden Saddleman Award for the Best Western Book of the Year. She writes convincingly of England, Medieval Wales, Norway, Mexico, and the United States, especially the frontier in Kansas, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. In spite of this wide-ranging subject matter, the American West and its history remain an enduring interest, and Williams …

Alvar Núñez Cabeza De Vaca, Peter Wild

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Recounting his adventures on an unknown continent, Cabeza de Vaca passes on a story he heard in an Indian village:
They said that a little man wandered through the region whom they called Badthing [Mala Cosa]. He had a beard and they never saw his features distinctly. When he came to a house, the inhabitants trembled and their hair stood on end. A blazing brand would suddenly shine at the door as he rushed in and seized whom he chose, deeply gashing him in the side with a very sharp flint two palms long and a hand wide. …

James D. Houston, Jonah Raskin

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Wallace Stegner defined one of the dilemmas facing the Western American regional writer when he observed, “The moment we segregate a writer and put the tag ‘Western’ on him we have implicitly downgraded him into some secondary category. If he's a writer we truly admire, we more often than not forget the regional limitation and think of him simply as a contemporary writer” (Stegner and Etulain 137). James D. Houston—a student of Stegner's at Stanford University and a long-time admirer of Stegner's work—has wrestled with this dilemma and has expressed a deep-seated ambivalence about his own identity and place as …

Matt Braun, Robert L. Gale

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Matthew Braun is a successful author of Western novels and criticism of Western fiction. He was bom outside Elk City, Oklahoma, in 1932. His family tree includes hunters, settlers, ranchers, stock inspectors, and members of the Cherokee tribe. From his early years Matt Braun associated with Cherokee and Osage Indians. During World War II, while his father was in the U.S. Navy and his mother worked at an army base, Braun went to a military academy in Bartlesville. After attending another academy at Claremore, he enrolled in a junior college, then graduated from Florida State University in 1954, with a …

Paula Gunn Allen, Elizabeth I. Hanson

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

“The breed is an Indian who is not an Indian.”
Paula Gunn Allen, “A Stranger in My Own Life”

At the center of Paula Gunn Allen’s vision of self and art is an individual alienated within. For Allen the idea of the “breed” reflects a preoccupation with alienation as a personal and as an aesthetic experience. Allen’s biography, her understanding of Native American literature, and her works of art and criticism are informed by the consciousness that “breeds” are aliens to traditional Native Americans and yet also aliens among whites. To know Allen’s life and work is to reflect deeply …

Dee Brown, Lyman B. Hagen

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

In 1974, Choice magazine voiced a widely held opinion when it characterized Dee A. Brown as “a distinguished writer of Western history” (284). By then he had also become known to a wide audience as a first-rate storyteller. Yet prior to the publication in 1970 of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, he had labored in relative obscurity, athough writing a steady stream of novels, articles, and historical reference books. Then the success and acceptance of Bury My Heart lifted him to national prominence.

George Wharton James, Peter Wild

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

The teenager mouthing poems before a mirror in an English industrial town would go on to enthrall overflow audiences at the San Diego Exposition of 1916. Away from the podium, he would earn large reputations as an anthropologist, explorer, social reformer, and booster of his adopted land. Along the way, he picked up some smudges: accusations of lying, of questionable tactics in selfpromotion, and of heinous sexual acts. Above all, he would write, producing much curious froth, such as The Story of Captain: The Horse with the Human Brain. The title alone shows how far George Wharton James would …

David Wagoner, Ron Mcfarland

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Writing for Mademoiselle in the spring of 1971, David Wagoner described his introduction to the Northwest as an ordeal lasting some five minutes. He had grown up in Whiting, Indiana, where his father had worked as a smelter at the steel mills in the industrial wasteland between Gary, Indiana, and Chicago, Illinois. Those images from his childhood are recorded in his first collection of poems, Dry Sun, Dry Wind (1953), and in five novels which are centered in the urban Midwest. But in 1971 the forty-five-year-old poet and novelist could speak not as a Midwesterner, but as a Westerner: “I …

John Graves, Dorys Crow Grover

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

John Graves, a Texas-born naturalist, visited the Brazos River in north-central Texas in 1957, after a decade of world wandering, and wrote a farewell to a river, a book that has become a pastoral classic in American belles-lettres. Goodbye to a River has since been joined by two other nature volumes, and all three have earned for Graves a considerable reputation for his literary style. M. E. Bradford writes that Graves’s voice is “deceptively simple and disarmingly personal in its flavor” (“John Graves” 142). In his craft, he joins fellow Texans Roy Bedichek and J. Frank Dobie, and his …

David Henry Hwang, Douglas Street

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

I am much better now .... My parents—they don’t know nothing about the world, about watching Benson at the Roxy, . . . downshifting onto the Ventura Freeway at midnight. They’re yellow ghosts and they’ve tried to cage me up with Chinese-ness when all the time we were in America. So, I’ve had to work real hard—real hard—to be myself. To not be a Chinese, a yellow, a slant, a gook. To be just a human being, like everyone else. I’ve paid my dues. And that’s why I am much better now. I’m making it, you know? I’m making it …

Tony Hillerman, Fred Erisman

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Readers quickly discover that there are three Tony Hillermans. One is the reporter, the streetwise observer of all the grandeur and all the depravity of the human race. Another is the storyteller, the person who sees in life’s events an endless source of entertainment. The third is the Southwestemer, a native of the region acutely aware of the locale’s complex uniqueness and the strata of human history that it embraces. All three personae merge in Hillerman’s writings, placing him solidly in the veritistic tradition established almost a century ago by Hamlin Garland. Writing in Crumbling Idols (1894), Garland calls for …

Joseph Wood Krutch, Paul N. Pavich

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Joseph Wood Krutch’s first encounter with the West was a turning point in his life. In his autobiography, More Lives Than One, he says, “No sooner were we speeding along the roller coaster road which leads across the undulating desert towards Albuquerque than I felt a sudden lifting of the heart. It seemed almost as though I had lived there in some happier previous existence and was coming back home” (308). This sense of being at home was to lead him to abandon his academic life at Columbia University as well as his position as prominent critic of the …

Edward Dorn, William Mcpheron

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Edward Dorn is a political poet committed to the ideals of democratic culture. A fierce partisan of the free play of critical thought, he is acutely sensitive to the socio-economic forces aligned against an open society. “Democracy,” he insists, “literally has to be cracked on the head all the time to keep it in good condition” (Contemporary Authors 129), and he understands its most serious enemy to be capitalism’s enormous power, which in the post-World Wai- II era has reached beyond the marketplace to infiltrate and control every aspect of American life. Though he despises the bourgeois ethos that …

Kenneth Rexroth, Lee Bartlett

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

In his introduction to a festschrift for Kenneth Rexroth, Geoffrey Gardner points out that “one of the great paradoxes of Rexroth’s enormously paradoxical career is that his widest reputation is for being the promoter of some vaguely defined avant garde of which he is also a member.” This is both true and unfortunate: true because Rexroth has done much to aid younger writers through the years (he was a presiding figure over at least two important “movements” in contemporary writing—the first San Francisco Renaissance of the forties, which brought attention to writers like Robert Duncan, William Everson, Philip Lamantia, and …

Ernest Haycox, Richard W. Etulain

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

In the mid-1950s noted journalist and historian Bernard De Voto referred to novelist Ernest Haycox (1899-1950), as “the old pro of horse opera,” the writer who “came closer than anyone else to making good novels” of the popular Western. Haycox, continued De Voto, “left his mark—I should say brand—on the style as well as the content of the Western” (14). In the nearly two generations since Haycox’s death many other commentators on the Old West as well as several writers of Westerns have agreed with De Voto in assigning Ernest Haycox a pivotal role in the development of the fictional …