Haunted by Home: The Life and Letters of Lynn Riggs by Phyllis Cole Braunlich (review)

180 Western American Literature The result is a melange, interlarded (in some places transition is weak) with bits and pieces of history to remind the reader the world continued to spin out its drama while Anderson pursued his muse. Perhaps one doubts the relevance of some of the items, such as Anne’s surprise that actor Edward Arnold ate his asparagus with his fingers and her disillusion with Sonja Henie, who could be a virago when crossed, or John Knox’s enthusiastic two-page report of a Thomas Wolfe lecture, or Professor Bennett’s fulsome account of the origins of the Texas Institute of Letters (in which Anderson had no part). However, readers will discover Rough and Rowdy Ways to be an absorb­ ing biography of a little-known wordsmith with “a great talent for one specific time and place”—the Depression Era. It also reveals the satisfactions of a scholarly adventurer’s detective labors. Yet the backward glance at the Twenties and Thirties, with close-ups of the homeless and deprived, makes it all worthwhile. Doubtless, when the last page is turned, readers will rush to the library for Hungry Men and Thieves Like Us. An accolade for meritorious service to the literary-minded for resurrecting Anderson and his classic novels (James Ward Lee includes Thieves Like Us in his Classics of Texas Fiction) is in order for Patrick Bennett. ERNESTINE P. SEWELL Commerce, Texas Haunted by Home: The Life and Letters of Lynn Riggs. By Phyllis 'Cole Braunlich. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988. xiv + 248 pages, $24.95.) The world knows Lynn Riggs primarily through Oklahoma! (1943), the Rodgers and Hammerstein adaptation of his Green Grow the Lilacs (1931). Yet Riggs wrote another twenty full-length dramas, half a dozen one-actplays, and several volumes of poetry; and much of his work has power and honesty, which in Oklahoma! are partially obscured by Broadway’s saccharine com­ mercializing. Drama critic John Gassner called Riggs “one of the most gifted writers ever to write for the American stage,” and Thomas A. Erhard said he was “the greatest playwright to come out of the Southwest” {Lynn Riggs 39). Writing in 1970, Erhard also warned that “Factual errors about Riggs’s life and career are surprisingly numerous in many books and articles ...” (3). Doctoral dissertations by Eloise Wilson (1957) and Charles Aughtry (1959) set the record straight for scholars; and now Phyllis Braunlich’s biog­ raphy gives the wider public “Riggs’s personal story [, which] is as compelling as his plays:the story of escaping a dark childhood, discovering his homosexual orientation, finding new freedom in the world of the arts, struggling for theatrical and literary success” (xii). But because Braunlich says little about the plays, Erhard’s study remains the best introduction to Riggs’s works. And unfortunately, Braunlich does not tell much about his companions; she pre­ Reviews 181 sents only excerpts from the letters; and her tenth chapter focuses more on the early reception of Oklahoma! than on the life of Riggs. Nevertheless, Braunlich’sbook isessential for anyone interested in western American drama. She provides a listing of all Riggs’sworks, giving the disposi­ tion of extant unpublished manuscripts; and she mentions (although not in sufficient detail) his acquaintances with western authors such as Mary Austin, Witter Bynner, Harvey Fergusson, Alice Corbin Henderson, Paul Horgan, Sidney Howard, Haniel Long, George Milburn, Stanley Vestal, and Dan Totheroh. Finally, Haunted by Home points to the need for the publication of Riggs’s letters and for a collected edition of his plays—many of them still unpublished. Although Braunlich’sis not a definitive literary biography, it tells much more than previously published studies about the man she rightly calls “one of America’s most distinguished playwrights and poets” (xi). JAMES H. MAGUIRE Boise State University Writing to Survive: The Private Notebooks of Conrad Richter. Edited by Harvena Richter. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988. 277 pages, $22.50.) Harvena Richter’s editing of her father’s private notebooks was obviously a labor of love—love not only for her father but for literature and writing as well. Her father’s papers included an enormous amount of working materials, as...