Faraway Women And The Atlantic Monthly

In the first decades of the twentieth century, famed Atlantic Monthly editor Ellery Sedgwick chose to publish a group of nontraditional writers he later referred to as Faraway Women, working-class authors living in the western United States far from his base in Boston. Cathryn Halverson surveys these enormously popular Atlantic contributors, among them a young woman raised in Oregon lumber camps, homesteaders in Wyoming, Idaho, and Alberta, and a world traveler who called Los Angeles and Honolulu home. Faraway Women and the Atlantic Monthly examines gender and power as it charts an archival journey connecting the least remembered writers and readers of the time with one of its most renowned literary figures, Gertrude Stein. It shows how distant friends, patrons, publishers, and readers inspired, fostered, and consumed the innovative life narratives of these unlikely authors, and it also tracks their own strategies for seizing creative outlets and forging new protocols of public expression. Troubling binary categories of east and west, national and regional, and cosmopolitan and local, the book recasts the coordinates of early twentieth-century American literature.

"In the first decades of the twentieth century, famed Atlantic Monthly editor Ellery Sedgwick chose to publish a group of nontraditional writers he later referred to as "Faraway Women," working-class authors living in the western United States far from his base in Boston. Cathryn Halverson surveys these enormously popular Atlantic contributors, among them a young woman raised in Oregon lumber camps, homesteaders in Wyoming, Idaho, and Alberta, and a world traveler who called Los Angeles and Honolulu home. Faraway Women and the "Atlantic Monthly" examines gender and power as it charts an archival journey connecting the least remembered writers and readers of the time with one of its most renowned literary figures, Gertrude Stein. It shows how distant friends, patrons, publishers, and readers inspired, fostered, and consumed the innovative life narratives of these unlikely authors, and it also tracks their own strategies for seizing creative outlets and forging new protocols of public expression. Troubling binary categories of east and west, national and regional, and cosmopolitan and local, the book recasts the coordinates of early twentieth-century American literature"--

This is the first major collection to remap the American West though the intersectional lens of gender and sexuality, especially in relation to race and Indigeneity. Organized through several interrelated key concepts, The Routledge Companion to Gender and the American West addresses gender and sexuality from and across diverse and divergent methodologies. Comprising 34 chapters by a team of international contributors, the Companion is divided into four parts: Genealogies Bodies Movements Lands The volume features leading and newer scholars whose essays connect interdisciplinary fields including Indigenous Studies, Latinx and Asian American Studies, Western American Studies, and Queer, Feminist, and Gender Studies. Through innovative methodologies and reclaimed archives of knowledge, contributors model fresh frameworks for thinking about relations of power and place, gender and genre, settler colonization and decolonial resistance. Even as they reckon with the ongoing gendered and racialized violence at the core of the American West, contributors forge new lexicons for imagining alternative Western futures. This pathbreaking collection will be invaluable to scholars and students studying the origins, myths, histories, and legacies of the American West. This is a foundational collection that will become invaluable to scholars and students across a range of disciplines including Gender and Sexuality Studies, Literary Studies, Indigenous Studies, and Latinx Studies.

Examining an eclectic group of western women’s autobiographical texts—canonical and otherwise—Playing House in the American West argues for a distinct regional literary tradition characterized by strategic representations of unconventional domestic life. The controlling metaphor Cathryn Halverson uses in her engrossing study is “playing house.” From Caroline Kirkland and Laura Ingalls Wilder to Willa Cather and Marilynne Robinson, from the mid-nineteenth to the late-twentieth centuries, western authors have persistently embraced wayward or eccentric housekeeping to prove a woman’s difference from western neighbors and eastern readers alike. The readings in Playing House investigate the surprising textual ends to which westerners turn the familiar terrain of the home: evaluating community; arguing for different conceptions of race and class; and perhaps most especially, resisting traditional gender roles. Western women writers, Halverson argues, render the home as a stage for autonomy, resistance, and imagination rather than as a site of sacrifice and obligation. The western women examined in Playing House in the American West are promoted and read as representatives of a region, as insiders offering views of distant and intriguing ways of life, even as they conceive of themselves as outsiders. By playing with domestic conventions, they recast the region they describe, portraying the West as a place that fosters female agency, individuality, and subjectivity.

A gripping story of a young woman growing up in the harsh setting of a Nevada ranch in the 1940s. No More Giants combines a deep love for the land with a bracingly honest view of family conflicts and the loss of dreams. Jenny struggles to survive and escape from the frustrations and hatred of her parents, recounting the hardships and joys of life in a stark and unforgiving landscape. Raised on Nevada ranch herself, Joaquina Ballard Howles portrays this way of life and its people with keen perception and powerful authenticity. Reminiscent of the work of Joan Didion and Sylvia Plath, Howles’s prose pierces the myths of the American cowboy with a sharp feminist sensibility and reveals the bleakness, the violence, and the beauty of life in the remote high desert country. Ignored when first published, No More Giants is now recognized as a classic work about women in the American West. Introduction by PEN/Jerard Fund and Willa Award winner Judy Blunt, author of Breaking Clean. No More Giants continues the mission of Recovered Books series to rescue exceptional books long unavailable to today’s readers.

Revisiting an almost-forgotten American interracial literary culture that advanced racial pluralism in the decades before the 1960s In Impermanent Blackness, Korey Garibaldi explores interracial collaborations in American commercial publishing—authors, agents, and publishers who forged partnerships across racial lines—from the 1910s to the 1960s. Garibaldi shows how aspiring and established Black authors and editors worked closely with white interlocutors to achieve publishing success, often challenging stereotypes and advancing racial pluralism in the process. Impermanent Blackness explores the complex nature of this almost-forgotten period of interracial publishing by examining key developments, including the mainstream success of African American authors in the 1930s and 1940s, the emergence of multiracial children’s literature, postwar tensions between supporters of racial cosmopolitanism and of “Negro literature,” and the impact of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements on the legacy of interracial literary culture. By the end of the 1960s, some literary figures once celebrated for pushing the boundaries of what Black writing could be, including the anthologist W. S. Braithwaite, the bestselling novelist Frank Yerby, the memoirist Juanita Harrison, and others, were forgotten or criticized as too white. And yet, Garibaldi argues, these figures—at once dreamers and pragmatists—have much to teach us about building an inclusive society. Revisiting their work from a contemporary perspective, Garibaldi breaks new ground in the cultural history of race in the United States.

New Directions in Print Culture Studies features new methods and approaches to cultural and literary history that draw on periodicals, print culture, and material culture, thus revising and rewriting what we think we know about the aesthetic, cultural, and social history of transnational America. The unifying questions posed and answered in this book are methodological: How can we make material, archival objects meaningful? How can we engage and contest dominant conceptions of aesthetic, historical, and literary periods? How can we present archival material in ways that make it accessible to other scholars and students? What theoretical commitments does a focus on material objects entail? New Directions in Print Culture Studies brings together leading scholars to address the methodological, historical, and theoretical commitments that emerge from studying how periodicals, books, images, and ideas circulated from the 19th century to the present. Reaching beyond national boundaries, the essays in this book focus on the different materials and archives we can use to rewrite literary history in ways that highlight not a canon of “major” literary works, but instead the networks, dialogues, and tensions that define print cultures in various moments and movements.

This towering classic of American frontier life paints a candid portrait of a young widow's work, travels, neighbors, and harsh existence on a Wyoming ranch in the early 1900s. Six original illustrations by N.C. Wyeth.