Emerson Hough by Delbert E. Wylde, and: Harvey Fergusson by James K. Folsom, and: Alice Corbin Henderson by T. M. Pearce, and: Frank Waters by Martin Bucco (review)

66 Western American Literature terms. In the great split of life-ways that Waters describes in Pumpkin Seed Point, we have the ingredients for spectacular conflict and misery. But the quiet and deeply powerful movement of the prose here, together with the straightforward portrayal of personal seeking, are both more reasonable than apocalypse and more heartening, too. If a book is going to be a morning star, in a sense, the utmost purity must be demanded of it—it must really be a uniting of above and below. It must “tell it in front.” I think Pumpkin Seed Point qualifies, and I hope it is a harbinger. T homas J. Lyon, Utah State University Emerson Hough. By Delbert E. Wylder. (Austin, Texas: Steck-Vaughn Company, 1969. 43 pages. $1.00.) Harvey Fergusson. By James K..Folsom. (Austin, Texas: Steck-Vaughn Company, 1969. 42 pages. $1.00.) Alice Corbin Henderson. By T. M. Pearce. (Austin, Texas: Steck-Vaughn Company, 1969. 44 pages. $1.00.) Frank Waters. By Martin Bucco. (Austin, Texas: Steck-Vaughn Company, 1969. 44 pages. $1.00.) The Steck-Vaughn Company of Austin has published four more pamphlets in its Southwest Writers Series under the general editorship of James W. Lee. Each of these critical studies has something to recommend it. Delbert Wylder labels Emerson Hough (1857-1923) a Southwest writer not by birth (he was a native of Iowa) but by “love andtemperament.” Although the actual amount of consecutive time which Hough spent in the Southwest was barely five years, that region pervades the best fiction and non-fiction of Hough; and if his place is secure in Western letters, it is a result of his details of cowboy life, cattle drives, and frontier towns. Un­ fortunately for Hough’s plots, America’s taste for a romanticized West had a disastrous effect on any Western writer who wrote to sell. The poor sales of Heart’s Desire, his most humorous and least sentimental novel, taught Hough a bitter lesson; thereafter he stuck to melodramatic romance. His business acumen ultimately landed him in the upper circles of Chicago society, despite the fact that he loathed city life. As an editor for Forest and Stream and later Field and Stream, Hough was in a position to work actively for the protection of Western forests and wildlife from the destructive folly and slaughter which came with civilization. It may well be that Hough’s writing Reviews 67 on conservation will outlive his novels, only two of which are now in print: The Covered Wagon and North of 36. Ironically, neither of these is Hough’s best fiction. Harvey Fergusson is a native Southwesterner whosemajor strength as a Western writer has been his rejection of the Western myth: “This West [the mythical one] may be childlike and innocent, but it is also childish and naive; and, in any case, the values it represents are nolonger open to us.” In his three best novels, Wolf Song, Grant of Kingdom} and The Conquest !of Don Pedro, Fergusson has shown the potential for fiction in the tense confrontation of the Spaniard, who looked back upon a glorious past, and the Anglo, who, having no past, could look only to the future. None of Fergusson’s characters, either Spanish or Anglo, can retreat into a mythical past or the wilds and long survive, however. They are forced to accept the present and society or to perish. James Folsom cites in Fergusson’s novels the omnipresent theme of “retreat to and return from either a changeless natural world or romantically interpreted past state.” Alice Corbin Henderson is probably best known for working with Harriet Monroe to launch Poetry magazine in 1912. Alice Corbin was a poet in her own right, one who though not native to the Southwest was to spend the better part of her mature life there. T. M. Pearce has written a fascinating account of the poet’s life in New Mexico, where she came in 1916 to recover from tuberculosis. Her presence in Santa Fe drew to the Southwest an im­ pressive list of visiting writers whose work she had edited, among them Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, John Gould Fletcher, Bliss Carmen, and...