Product Description: Americans know their Wyatt Earp. They know the valiant Western hero whose legend culminated in the famous shootout at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona. There was a time in the not-so-distant past that American children would dream of having the same type of courage as Wyatt Earp...read more

Product Description: This is a literary discussion of one-half of Zane Grey's Westerns, selected to best show the broad scope of this popular author's interests in the West. The text explains how these novels "work," while pointing out Grey's ecological concern for the natural world--its vastness, color and beauty...read more

Product Description: In what remains the only full-length biography of Owen Wister (1860–1938), Darwin Payne details the life of the man who created the popular image of the cowboy that dominated American culture from the early 1900s to the 1960s. Payne follows Wister from his privileged childhood in Philadelphia, to his undergraduate days at Harvard, to his musical studies in Europe, to his “discovery” of the West, and through his maturation as an individual and a writer...read more

Product Description: In Mark Twain and the American West, Joseph Coulombe explores how Mark Twain deliberately manipulated contemporary conceptions of the American West to create and then modify a public image that eventually won worldwide fame. He establishes the central role of the western region in the development of a persona that not only helped redefine American manhood and literary celebrity in the late nineteenth century, but also produced some of the most complex and challenging writings in the American canon...read more

Product Description: The Confluence American Authors Series publishes criticism, interviews, manuscript selections, bibliographies, letters and other materials concerning important contemporary and modern American writers. In James Welsh, the first volume of the series, nine noted authors and critics, including Jack L Davis, Robert Gish, A...read more

Product Description: In a career spanning more than fifty years, Wallace Stegner (1909–93) emerged as the greatest contemporary author of the American West—writing more than two dozen works of history, biography, essays, and fiction, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Angle of Repose and the bestselling Crossing to Safety...read more

Product Description: Mary Austin (1868-1934)—eccentric, independent, and unstoppable—was twenty years old when her mother moved the family west. Austin's first look at her new home, glimpsed from California's Tejon Pass, reset the course of her life, “changed her horizons and marked the beginning of her understanding, not only about who she was, but where she needed to be...read more

Product Description: 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...read more

Product Description: This wide-ranging book illuminates the importance of the Western in American history. It explores the interconnections between the Western in both literature and film and the United States in the 20th century.Structured chronologically, the book traces the evolution of the Western as a uniquely American form...read more

Product Description: Zane Grey was a disappointed aspirant to major league baseball and an unhappy dentist when he belatedly decided to take up writing at the age of thirty. He went on to become the most successful American author of the 1920s, a significant figure in the early development of the film industry, and a central player in the early popularity of the Western...read more

Product Description: Well known for his sketches, paintings, and sculptures of the Old West, Charles M. Russell (1864-1926) was also an accomplished author in the humorous genre known as "local color." Raphael Cristy sorts Russell's writings into four general categories: serious Indian stories, men encountering wildlife, cattle range characters, and nineteenth-century westerners facing twentieth-century challenges...read more

Product Description: Well known for his sketches, paintings, and sculptures of the Old West, Charles M. Russell (1864-1926) was also an accomplished author in the humorous genre known as "local color." Raphael Cristy sorts Russell's writings into four general categories: serious Indian stories, men encountering wildlife, cattle range characters, and nineteenth-century westerners facing twentieth-century challenges...read more

"I suppose that if I didn't have the outlook of a writer, I might get better at storytelling . . ." -Leslie Marmon Silko Laguna Pueblo author Leslie Marmon Silko was raised in a culture with a strong oral tradition. She also grew up in a household where books were cherished and reading at the dinner table was not deemed rude, but instead was encouraged. In his examination of Silko's award-winning literature, Brewster E. Fitz explores the complex dynamic between the spoken story and the written word, revealing how it carries over from Silko's upbringing and plays out in her writings. Focusing on critical essays by and interviews with Silko, Fitz argues that Silko's storytelling is informed not so much by oral Laguna culture as by the Marmon family tradition in which writing was internalized long before her birth. In Silko's writings, this conflicted desire between the oral and the written evolves into a yearning for a paradoxical written orality that would conceivably function as a perfect, nonmediated language. The critical focus on orality in Native literature has kept the equally important tradition of Native writing from being honored. By offering close readings of stories from Storyteller and Ceremony, as well as passages from Almanac of the Dead and Gardens in the Dunes, Fitz shows how Silko weaves the oral and the written, the spirit and the flesh, into a new vision of Pueblo culture. As Fitz asserts, Silko's written word, rather than obscuring or destroying her culture's oral tradition, serves instead to sharpen it. Volume 47 in the American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series

Product Description: When the wounded bear he faced on a mountain ledge that day turned aside, James Curwood felt that he had been spared. From this encounter he became an avid conservationist. He wrote relentlessly? magazine stories and books and then for the new medium of motion pictures...read more