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Reviewed by:
  • The Tallgrass Prairie Reader ed. by John T. Price
  • Matthew J. C. Cella
John T. Price, ed., The Tallgrass Prairie Reader. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2014. 352 pp. Paper, $25; e-book, $25.

Since the publication of his first book, Not Just Any Land: A Personal and Literary Journey into the American Grasslands (2004), John Price has established himself as one of the major muses of the American grasslands. This status is bolstered by his latest book, The Tallgrass Prairie Reader, an edited anthology of autobiographical nonfiction narratives about the tallgrass bioregion, a swath of “true prairies” running from the eastern sections of the Dakotas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, [End Page 160] and Kansas to the western portions of Wisconsin and Illinois. Almost completely decimated by centuries of agricultural development, the tallgrass prairies represent a kind of environmental cautionary tale. The essays within Price’s anthology provide various firsthand accounts of the rich history of this region, some that celebrate its unique beauty, some that mourn its loss, and others that make a poignant case for reversing the trend of history and restoring the tallgrass prairies to some semblance of their former glory.

Indeed, one of the goals of the anthology, as Price points out in his introduction, is to fill a need for a “historical collection of literature from and about the tallgrass territory” (xxi) as a way to illustrate, in part, the “correlative relationship” between “the aesthetic treatment of prairies in popular literature and art and their ecological mistreatment” (xiv). This approach is reflected in the book’s chronological structure, with essays organized into sections on “The Nineteenth Century,” “The Twentieth Century,” and “The Twenty-First Century.” While each of the essays stands on its own, reading the collection front to back reveals the subtle changes in cultural attitudes toward the tallgrass prairies that accompanied the bioregion’s transformation through the human- driven phases of exploration, settlement, development, depletion, and restoration. The essays from the nineteenth century are penned primarily by explorers and tourists who encountered the tallgrass wilderness and attempted to make sense of its distinctive ecological makeup. While many nineteenth- century writers, like Charles Dickens, dismissed the tallgrass region as “oppressive in its barren monotony” (33), many others, like Margaret Fuller and Walt Whitman, waxed poetic about the grasslands, viewing them as symbolic of the unique character of America itself. Appreciation for and nostalgia about this tallgrass wilderness are persistent themes in the twentieth century, as writers began to grapple with the consequences of the agricultural conquest of the region. Meridel Le Seur’s “Drought” is emblematic in this regard, as she bears witness to the Dust Bowl phenomenon, a tragic manifestation of the century- long economic exploitation of the prairie wilderness. While loss is a prominent component of twentieth- century tallgrass literature, with the majority of true prairies plowed up by the middle of the century, an emphasis on conservation and restoration also emerges in the latter [End Page 161] half of the century and persists into our own time, as writers like John Madson, Don Gayton, and Cindy Crosby provide literary support for the effort to replant native prairies and bring the tall-grasses back.

Ultimately, The Tallgrass Prairie Reader offers a rich and diverse “deep map” of a distinct American landscape, a comprehensive literary cartography of the “true prairies.” In this regard it is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the tallgrass region.

Matthew J. C. Cella
Shippensburg University
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