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Articles 91 - 120 of 154
Full-Text Articles in Rhetoric and Composition
Herbert Krause, Arthur R. Huseboe
Herbert Krause, Arthur R. Huseboe
Western Writers Series Digital Editions
No abstract provided.
William Everson, Lee Bartlett
William Everson, Lee Bartlett
Western Writers Series Digital Editions
No modern poet has been more dedicated to the American West as both place and idea than William Everson. From his first chapbook. These Are the Ravens (1935), to his most recent full-length volume of poetry. Masks of Drought (1981), and his prose meditations, Birth of a Poet (1982), Everson has asked us again and again to understand the power of what he calls the “archetype of the West": “the Western writer stands as term of the American impulse, and as term he constitutes its mainstream rather than a merely peripheral and incidental relevance” (Archetype West 147). While during …
Charles Sealsfield, Walter Grünzweig
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, …
Barry Lopez, Peter Wild
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 …
Western American Literary Criticism, Martin Bucco
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.
Mari Sandoz, Helen Winter Stauffer
Mari Sandoz, Helen Winter Stauffer
Western Writers Series Digital Editions
No abstract provided.
Tillie Olsen, Abigail Martin
Tillie Olsen, Abigail Martin
Western Writers Series Digital Editions
No abstract provided.
William Saroyan, Edward Halsey Foster
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?
Richard Hugo, Donna Gerstenberger
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.
Sophus K. Winther, Barbara Howard Meldrum
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 …
Struthers Burt, Raymond C. Phillips Jr.
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, …
James Welch, Peter Wild
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 …
Preston Jones, Mark Busby
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 …
The New Wild West: The Urban Mysteries Of Dashiell Hammett And Raymond Chandler, Paul Skenazy
The New Wild West: The Urban Mysteries Of Dashiell Hammett And Raymond Chandler, Paul Skenazy
Western Writers Series Digital Editions
No abstract provided.
Jessamyn West, Ann Dahlstrom Farmer
Jessamyn West, Ann Dahlstrom Farmer
Western Writers Series Digital Editions
No abstract provided.
Horace Mccoy, Mark Royden Winchell
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 …
Will Henry / Clay Fisher, Robert L. Gale
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.
Mabel Dodge Luhan, Jane V. Nelson
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 …
Scandinavian Immigrant Literature, Christer Lennart Mossberg
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 …
George R. Stewart, John Caldwell
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.
Charles F. Lummis, Robert E. Fleming
Charles F. Lummis, Robert E. Fleming
Western Writers Series Digital Editions
No abstract provided.
Clarence King, Peter Wild
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 …
Benjamin Capps, Ernest B. Speck
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.
Dorothy Johnson, Judy Alter
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.
Leslie Marmon Silko, Per Seyersted
Leslie Marmon Silko, Per Seyersted
Western Writers Series Digital Editions
No abstract provided.
Joaquin Miller, Benjamin S. Lawson
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 …
Tom Robbins, Mark Siegel
Tom Robbins, Mark Siegel
Western Writers Series Digital Editions
No abstract provided.
Janet Lewis, Charles L. Crow
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.
Gary Snyder, Bert Almon
Jack Kerouac, Harry Russell Huebel
Jack Kerouac, Harry Russell Huebel
Western Writers Series Digital Editions
No abstract provided.