Redefining the American Dream: The Novels of Willa Cather by Sally Peltier Harvey (review)

Reviews 185 The Birth o f the B eat G eneration: V isionaries, R ebels, and H ipsters, 1944-1960. By Steven Watson. (New York: Pantheon, 1995. 387 pages, $27.50.) The Beat Generation is having one of its revivals right now, the biggest so far. This book is the latest item in Steven W atson’s important series, C ircles of the Twentieth Century, and is an excellent successor to his Strange Bedfellows (an account of the early New York avant-garde) and The Harlem R enaissance. Watson has curated a major Beat exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington. His knowledge is deep: he provides the best narrative to date of the Beat Generation, a movement which began in New York but reached its first large audiences through the San Francisco Renaissance in the m id-fifties. He manages to make a com plex story coherent, not a small achievem ent in dealing with Bohemia. Some of the events took place in Paris, Tangiers, and M exico, and the relationships were tangled. Watson provides charts showing when writ­ ers met each other and explaining the nature of the relationship, very useful aids for understanding a literary generation. Readers w ill learn a great deal about western figures like Snyder, W halen, and Rexroth, and about those Bay Area sojourners from the East, Kerouac and Ginsberg. The apparatus includes many pictures— some of them quite rare— as w ell as a remarkably detailed chronology (twenty-two pages) of literary and social developm ents and a helpful bibliography. Watson makes fine use of the broad margins of his book, filling them with such items as definitions of slang, “reading lists” for his authors— what was Snyder reading in the 1950s?— and catalogues of the bars where much of the literary activity took place. Watson has benefited from consultation with Herbert Huncke, the hustler who had such an impact on the New York Beats. Watson also gives space to the neglected women of the movement, like Hettie Jones, Joyce Johnson, Carolyn Cassady, and Diane Di Prima. He might have given more attention to John Clellon Holm es, whose novel, Go, introduced the Beats to America five years before On the Road. This is an indispensable book. The important question is, when w ill a paperback edition appear? BERT ALMON U niversity o f A lberta Redefining the American Dream: The N ovels o f Willa Cather. By Sally Peltier Harvey. (Cranbury, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University, 1995. 190 pages, $34.50.) During the tw enty-eight years betw een W illa Cather’s first novel, A lexan der’ s B ridge (1912) and her last, Sapphira and the Slave G irl (1940), 186 Western American Literature America underwent drastic change. Cather’s first novel appeared during pros­ perity as machines replaced the hard work that had characterized the pioneer period. But before Cather’s career ended, America had been involved in a world war, had faced a major depression, and had noted diverse international political movem ents. Sally Peltier Harvey’s book places Cather’s novels in historical and social context as she exam ines the theme of the American Dream in Cather’s works. D efining the American Dream is difficult, but Harvey, referring to it as a “cul­ tural artifact,” relies on a common conception of individual achievem ent and material success to show how Cather’s novels and four later short stories inter­ sect with this “artifact,” both in plot and in the context o f the time of their pub­ lication. D eveloping Cather’s work chronologically, Harvey groups as many as four novels together in a chapter. The strongest of these covers A lexan der’ s B ridge, O Pioneers!, The Song o f the Lark, and My Antonia. In other chapters, I som e­ tim es felt Harvey was stretching too far to make her point. To defend her stance requires a large amount of outside support that exam ines the contemporary scene. W hile Harvey does offer som e such support, a reader needs more depth to understand how her thesis continues to apply to Cather’s full career as a nov­ elist. Because...