The Literary West

Given in honor of District Governor Hugh Summers and Mrs. Ahnise Summers by the Rotary Club of Aggieland with matching support from the Sara and John H. Lindsey '44 Fund, Texas A & M University Press, 2004.

With more than forty selections, including essays, short stories, poetry, excerpts from novels and diaries, and a complete play, this authoritative and adventuresome collection shows why the West has occupied such a prominent place in the national consciousness, and reveals that western writers may currently be mapping out a significant development in American thought.

The test of western literature has invariably been Is it real? Is it accurate? Authentic? The result is a standard anything but literary, as Nathaniel Lewis observes in this ambitious work, a wholesale rethinking of the critical terms and contexts?and thus of the very nature?of western writing. ø Why is western writing virtually missing from the American literary canon but a frequent success in the marketplace? The skewed status of western literature, Lewis contends, can be directly attributed to the strategies of the region?s writers, and these strategies depend consistently on the claim of authenticity. A perusal of western American authorship reveals how these writers effectively present themselves as accurate and reliable recorders of real places, histories, and cultures?but not as stylists or inventors. The imaginative qualities of this literature are thus obscured in the name of authentic reproduction. Through a study of a set of western authors and their relationships to literary and cultural history, Lewis offers a reconsideration of the deceptive and often undervalued history of western American literature. ø With unequivocal admiration for the literature under scrutiny, Lewis exposes the potential for startling new readings once western writing is freed from its insistence on a questionable authenticity. His book sets out a broader system of inquiry that points writers and critics of western literature in the direction of a new and truly sustaining literary tradition.

This Companion provides a comprehensive introduction to the literature of the American West, one of the most vibrant and diverse literary traditions.

Bret Harte was the best-known and highest paid writer in America in the early 1870s, yet his vexed attempts to earn a living by his pen led to the failure of his marriage and, in 1878, his departure for Europe. Gary Scharnhorst’s biography of Harte traces the growing commercial appeal of western fiction and drama on both sides of the Atlantic during the Gilded Age, a development in which Harte played a crucial role. Harte’s pioneering use of California local color in such stories as "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" challenged genteel assumptions about western writing and helped open eastern papers to contributions by Mark Twain and others. The popularity of Bret Harte’s writings was driven largely by a literary market that his western stories helped create. The first Harte biography in nearly seventy years to be written entirely from primary sources, this book documents Harte’s personal relationships and, in addition, his negotiations with various publishers, agents, and theatrical producers as he exploited popular interest in the American West.

The literary critic defends the importance of Western literature from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Kafka and Beckett in this acclaimed national bestseller. NOMINATED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD Harold Bloom's The Western Canon is more than a required reading list—it is a “heroically brave, formidably learned” defense of the great works of literature that comprise the traditional Western Canon. Infused with a love of learning, compelling in its arguments for a unifying written culture, it argues brilliantly against the politicization of literature and presents a guide to the essential writers of the western literary tradition (The New York Times Book Review). Placing William Shakespeare at the “center of the canon,” Bloom examines the literary contributions of Dante Alighieri, John Milton, Jane Austen, Emily Dickenson, Leo Tolstoy, Sigmund Freud, James Joyce, Pablo Neruda, and many others. Bloom's book, much-discussed and praised in publications as diverse as The Economist and Entertainment Weekly, offers a dazzling display of erudition and passion. “An impressive work…deeply, rightly passionate about the great books of the past.”—Michel Dirda, The Washington Post Book World

"For fans of Ian McGuire's The North Water and Michael Punke's The Revenant, Child in the Valley by Gordy Sauer is a coming-of-age story set in the harsh landscape of Gold Rush America, centering on a orphan's journey to California in a wagon train of ruthless 49ers. Seventeen-year-old Joshua Gaines is suddenly orphaned in 1849, and after discovering that his foster father has left him deeply in debt, he flees his St. Louis home for Independence, Missouri. There, he plans to offer his medical expertise in exchange for passage to California in a Gold Rush party. Joshua is initially rebuffed given his youth and inexperience, but as his resentment and greed grow, a chance encounter with a ruthless adventurer and an ex-slave enlists him in a party comprised of provincial identical twins and a wealthy Englishman. The party departs overland along a 1,500-mile trail carved out by hardship, disease, violence, and death. When finally they arrive starving and exhausted in California's Sacramento Valley, Joshua discovers that attaining those riches is not as simple as pulling them from the riverbed, forcing him to redefine his sense of morality within the context of his greed; his complex sexuality; and the growing, though still-fledgling, American government. This novel is part of the Cold Mountain Fund Series, in partnership with Charles Frazier"--