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I n M e m o r i a m : DON D. W A L K E R (1917-2000) After a brief illness, Don D. Walker died at his home in Salt Lake City this past June. A native Utahn, Don received his Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Minnesota, where he primarily worked with Theodore Homberger and Henry Nash Smith. He taught in the English Department at the University of Utah for nearly forty years, retiring as professor emeritus in 1984. An influential figure in the founding of the Western Literature Association, Don served as its 1970 president and was also a frequent contributor to Western American Literature. His major articles on both the literature and the historiography of the cattle and fur trades were notable for their fierce advocacy of an imaginative and intellectual life freed from the exacting demands of literal authenticity or what he called “naïve realism.” In his critical work, Don insisted that the dusty world of cowboys and cows could be a vital site for the creative mind’s grappling with the weightiest of human concerns. And he firmly believed that if another Faulkner or Patrick White were ever to emerge from a Fillmore, Utah, it would happen because there was a demanding literary criticism in place. In addition to his book Clio’s Cowboys, he collected and pub­ lished his humorous tales of modem cowboy life under the title The Adventures of Barney Tullus. Those WLA members who attended the 1986 annual conference in Durango undoubtedly will recall as a high point Don’s reading of “The Blue Saddle Blanket,” his story about a cowpuncher aspiring to write the one-paragraph Western version of Robbe-Grillet’s nouveau fiction. In the obituary he wrote a few days before his death, Don voiced both his pride in his family and his pleasure in keeping an axe running true and prose ringing clear. His last request was for all of his friends to give a book, any book, to someone. Among his last words were these: “What else should our lives be but a continual series of beginnings, of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become? . . . What else is death but the refusal any longer to grow and suffer change?” — S.T. ...

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