Timothy Flint by James K. Folsom (review)

Reviews 231 we need now is a publisher who will put together the Bar F Bar edition of the complete works so we can have them all together. C. L . S o n n ic h se n , The University of Texas at El Paso-Texas Western College Timothy Flint. By James K. Folsom. (New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1964. 174 pages, $3.50.) The Twayne United States Authors Series already includes more than a hundred titles of a projected two hundred fifty. Obviously in so ambitious a project there must appear books on minor writers in American literature. In fact, a basic value of such a series is the possibility of calling attention to authors whose literary reputations have been neglected. James K. Folsom’s Timothy Flint is such a book. Professor Folsom is concerned with the resurrecting of “a minor figure in the pantheon of American letters” because Flint’s contemporaries thought highly of his work and because he believes that Flint’s writing has intrinsic literary value. Folsom’s emphasis on the literary values of Flint’s books is in keeping with the basic aim of the Twayne series; a book written within the prescribed Twayne format must have a special emphasis. Timothy Flint, contemporary of James Fenimore Cooper, was born in Massachusetts in 1780. A graduate of Harvard, he spent some time teaching and preaching in Massachusetts. After preaching as a missionary throughout New England, he went west, preaching with the support of the Missionary Society of Connecticut. When his poor health limited his missionary work, he turned to newspaper reporting and other free-lance writing for a living. His main works, published between 1826 and 1834, include Francis Berrian (1826), George Mason (1829), The Shoshonee Valley (1830), and Biographical Memoir of Daniel Boone (1833), which Professor Folsom is editing for the Twayne United States Classics Series. Francis Berrian, Flint’s first novel (on the dust jacket of Timothy Flint it is called “the first Western”) is the story of an American who went to the Southwest during the Mexican Revolution of 1813. George Mason, the Young Backwoodsman, as the title indicates, is a story of pioneering in the Mississippi Valley. The Shoshonee Valley, which Professor Folsom considers Flint’s best work, deals with the same problems presented in Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans — the contrast between the “noble savage” and the destructive forces of civilization. 232 Western American Literature It is significant that Professor Folsom considers Flint’s book on Boone, which is a chronicle, important enough to reprint. The question of whether Flint is an important literary figure or merely a minor writer, a part of the history of American letters, is continually in the background in Professor Folsom’s book. Although he insists that his purpose is not to give Flint credit for more than he deserves, Professor Folsom seems to be trying to establish Flint as more than just a minor writer. Time will tell whether or not he has succeeded. Q r l a n S a w e y , Pan American College The Woman at Otowi Crossing. By Frank Waters. (Denver: Alan Swallow, 1966. 300 pages, $4.95.) Frank Water’s latest novel is reassuringly familiar, yet pleasantly unusual — its local history and metaphysical truth skillfully developed through opposition and resolution. As in his classic Man Who Killed the Deer and People of the Valley, this novel symbolizes the 20th-century hostility between shiny science and hoary religion; but this time Waters focuses the conflicts — analysis vs. vision, logic vs. intuition, intellect vs. emotion — not on Indian or SpanishAmerican protagonists, but on four Anglo-Americans: the heroine-mystec Helen Chalmers, middle-aged owner of the symbolic crossroads tearoom below Los Alamos —Forbidden City of Atomic Research; the semi-romantic Jack Turner, a blunt Western newspaperman and Helen’s lover-turned-friend; the arrogantly intellectual Emily, Helen’s abandoned daughter, seeking a mother but finding a substitute —a Ph.D. in anthropology; and Dr. Edmund Gaylord, who loves Emily but gleans from Emily’s mother that Subject plus Object equals One. Among the several “primitives,” the ancient Pueblo cacique Facundo assumes the key role as Helen’s spiritual guide...